Preserving Brazilian football history

As five-times World Champions, Brazil is respected worldwide as a leading football nation. Piql is proud to assist the Brazilian Football Confederation in preserving impressive football history for coming generations of supporters.

The Brazilian Football Confederation (Portuguese: Confederação Brasileira de Futebol or CBF) is the governing body of football in Brazil. In its daily activities, it produces large amounts of legal and procedural documentation stored on paper and as digital files, as well as vast amounts of media content of historical value. The institution also manages a collection of information stored on microfiche.

President of CBF, Mr. Marco Polo Del Nero, is responsible for modernizing and implementing a complete digital workflow for all football-related activities in Brazil. The digitization of Brazil’s football history is crucial and must comply with legal regulations that protects the players’ rights. Football related documentation ranges from player contracts to doping tests that are executed after every game. The CBF workflow integrates all types of documents and allows access to state level entities as well as individuals.

PROBLEM

Integrating CBF’s paper, microfiche and born-digital files into a transparent environment was a challenge. Some of the storage media required digitization, and the metadata has varied over time and had to be adjusted to modern-day requirements. As an example, when an athlete retires, the information generated during his or her career must be securely stored to ensure all rights are protected. Documents are usually stored in various formats that need to be digitized and integrated with CBF’s IT infrastructure.

CBF legacy files stored in analog form on microfiche require special attention as access is needed on a daily basis for former players and staff that are now reaching the age of retirement. The IT department is also undergoing major infrastructure changes to implement paperless workflows for all football related activities in Brazil in compliance with ISO 14721 and regulations from National Legislation.

"Piql has enabled CBF to preserve the memories of our world class Champions and protected the rights of all athletes and staff that form the football community in Brazil."

SOLUTION

The main interest of CBF was long-term preservation and storage. The initial plan was to implement the technology for their historical documents. However, after tests, technical and legal discussions, CBF understood that Piql’s technology would also enable nationwide digitization of all football related workflows as well as legal compliance for information preservation.

Piql was awarded a service and consulting contract to digitize analog documentation and to implement an OAIS-compliant digital workflow. Microfiche and paper documents are digitized, processed for OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and authenticated with digital signature. CBF’s cloud infrastructure is integrated with Piql, so files are easily transferred for preservation and physical storage at the Arctic World Archive.

Piql provides all services related to digitization and IT integration, including the installation of digitizing equipment within CBF headquarters in Rio de Janeiro and implementation of a workflow that enables access to the CBF Cloud integrated with Piql Arctic World Archive from any soccer stadium in Brazil.

CBF can from now on provide access to digitally authenticated files. The digital workflow integrated with Piql enables the protection and preservation of all legal documents and historical media assets, and files may be retrieved by any authorized user.

FUTURE

CBF will have a digital workflow where all media assets will be preserved for future generations on piqlFilm.

As passionate football supporters, Piql Brasil expects that our biggest challenge will be to have sufficient storage space on our IT infrastructure and at Arctic World Archive for preserving assets from all future world titles that Brazil will conquer.

"Piql’s technology is like carving data in stone, piqlFilm is a robust and migration-free medium that protects our data from any form of cyberattack and guarantees future access at the same time."