Audio replay and storage systems:
critical equipment maintenance, storage and timing issues
Kevin Bradley
Manager, Digital and Audio
Preservation
National Library of
In a relatively short
period of time sound archivists have had to come to terms with some fundamental
paradigm shifts in the way they approach sound archiving. For example, in
December 1997, in response to the first recommendation of Bringing
Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families,
the Commonwealth Government
announced the National Library would be funded to develop and manage a new oral
history project. At that time the
National Library’s well developed sound preservation strategy was at an interim
stage between digital and analogue. It
involved the production of an analogue reel, CD and cassette duplicates of the
original DAT tape using high end digital audio workstations (DAW) designed for
post production of audio materials. By
the time the project had reached its completion date in 2002, reel tapes had
become more difficult to purchase, CD-R much cheaper and of generally lower
quality, DAWs specifically for audio preservation
were available, and the Library had refocused its digital preservation strategy
so that it relied on the Digital Object Storage System (DOSS), an in-house
digital mass storage system (DMSS).
The development of DMSSs brings closer the vision of a persistent and
replicable archive to which sound archivists have aspired, however it also
raises many issues that were not envisaged under the earlier strategies. These include the incorporation and transfer
of existing digital and analogue to the storage system, the management of adequate
descriptive and preservation metadata, the management of that data, the choice
of carrier from which to transfer, (preservation CD or original carrier?) and
many other new dilemmas with which to wrestle.
These issues, coupled with the disappearance of adequate replay
equipment from the market, renders the timing and planning of what will clearly
be the last transfer from a discrete carrier to an integrated system, critical.