Navigating the Analog Waves: Digitizing Audio Cassettes for Your Collection
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The document outlines the goals and process of a project to digitize and provide online access to audio recordings from the archives of the Quest Club of Fort Wayne, a local lecture society. The project involved setting up a digitization station, creating metadata standards, digitizing the cassette tapes to an archival format, and making the collection available online through a content management system. Key lessons learned included the importance of project management and planning for sustainability beyond the initial project.
Navigating the Analog Waves: Digitizing Audio Cassettes for Your Collection
- 1. Navigating the WAVES AUDIO
- 2. Photo from ¡°History of the Quest Club¡±, SW McGill, 1948 ME Kay Gregg kgregg@acpl.info
- 3. TAPE ARCHIVE
- 4. ?
- 5. ?
- 7. Idealistic about: Collection Development Archives and Records Management Digital Libraries Public Library Management Cataloging
- 8. INTERNSHIP
- 9. WHAT I DID WHAT I LEARNED PRESENTATION
- 10. Photo from ¡°History of the Quest Club¡±, SW McGill, 1948 MY PROJECT
- 11. QUEST CLUB Lecture society presenting since 1911 Recording audio since 1974 Fort Wayne power brokers: streets, parks and schools
- 12. Photo from ¡°History of the Quest Club¡±, SW McGill, 1948 ¡° The Quest Club of Fort Wayne, provides a forum to prepare, present, and discuss original research by Club members on social, economic, scientific, cultural, political, and historical topics.¡±
- 13. HOUSED IN THE BASEMENT
- 14. GOALS 1. Set up a digitization station to process cassette tape resources in the Genealogy Center.
- 15. GOALS 2. Create a metadata template to attach information to each record.
- 16. GOALS 3. Identify archival standards for digital audio.
- 17. GOALS 4. Create a public collection using the library's content management system, contentDM.
- 18. GOALS 5. Author?training?materials for Genealogy Center staff and volunteers.
- 20. GOAL 1 DIGITIZATION STATION
- 21. HARDWARE LAPTOP WITH SOUNDCARD FAST-ish PROCESSOR BIG INTERNAL HARDRIVE
- 22. Intel Core 2 Duo 2GHz CPU 3GB RAM 250GB HDD
- 23. HARDWARE TASCAM PortaStudio 2 track NICE HEAD PHONES QUIET ROOM
- 24. ?
- 25. HARDWARE 2 2 TB EXTERNAL DRIVES
- 26. ?
- 29. SOFTWARE Adobe Acrobat Pro
- 30. SOFTWARE EXCEL
- 31. GOAL 2 INFO STANDARDS
- 32. METADATA ??
- 33. METADATA ??
- 34. METADATA ?? Put some thought to your naming convention
- 35. Never underestimate the power of a check list
- 36. GOAL 3 DIGITIZATION STANDARDS
- 37. George Massenburg says:? 96 kHz, 24 bit, linear?PCM ?les are the minimum standard for digital audio preservation??le.
- 38. The International Association for Sound and Video Archives?standards 96 kHz, 24 bits. ?
- 39. GOAL 4 GIVE IT TO USERS
- 40. ?
- 41. MAKE IT A BIG DEAL BLOG ABOUT IT PARTNER WITH SCHOOL PROGRAMS LINK IT TO LOCAL EVENTS INCENTIVISE USE¡SRP
- 42. WHAT I LEARNED
- 43. Associate Director, IT and Production Ann Arbor District Library ELI NEIBERGER http://vimeo.com/32169538
- 44. POLICY COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT DIGITAL ACQUISTION
- 45. ASSESMENT Subject Age Uniqueness Quality Quantity
- 46. Item is not unique Item is outside your acquisition policy Item is unrelated to any existing collection Item is jacked up* * More on preservation later
- 47. Photo from ¡°History of the Quest Club¡±, SW McGill, 1948 Support from the Creators Club Still Exists Unique Content Great Condition
- 48. Dario Robleto 2002"At War With the Entropy of Nature / Ghosts Don't Always Want to Come Back"
- 49. DIGITIZATION ¡Ù PRESERVATION Know this¡ Establish whether and when original materials can be disposed of with confidence. Capturing Analog Sound for Digital Preservation: Report of a Roundtable Discussion of Best Practices for Transferring Analog Discs and Tapes
- 50. DIGITIZATION ¡Ù PRESERVATION Know this¡ Establish a redundancy protocol for a given digital archive and for the migration of the digital archive media as well as the underlying digital archive technology Capturing Analog Sound for Digital Preservation: Report of a Roundtable Discussion of Best Practices for Transferring Analog Discs and Tapes
- 51. DIGITIZATION ¡Ù PRESERVATION Verify effectiveness of the integrity of the migration protocols including background archive soft error checking. Capturing Analog Sound for Digital Preservation: Report of a Roundtable Discussion of Best Practices for Transferring Analog Discs and Tapes
- 52. THEN WHY BOTHER?
- 53. DIGITAL PRESERVATION Protects the information, even when the original format degrades
- 54. DIGITAL CONVERSION Gets the information out to users- portable and easily shared
- 55. DIGITIZATION ¡Ù PRESERVATION BIG LOSSLESS OPEN SOURCE (preferably)
- 56. DIGITIZATION ¡Ù PRESERVATION . WAV
- 57. ?
- 58. Tape Vault Library of Congress Says: Long-term Storage (Materials having permanent value) Storage areas should be kept at a constant 45 to 50¡ã F or colder (do not store magnetic tapes below 46¡ã F as it may cause lubrication separation from the tape binder) and 20 to 30% RH for magnetic tapes (open reel and cassette) and 45 to 50% RH for all others. Widely fluctuating temperature or RH severely shortens the life span of all recordings. Environmental conditions shall not fluctuate more that ¡À5¡ã F or ¡À5% RH over a 24 hour period. Store in dark areas except when being accessed, being sure to keep recordings away from UV sources (unshielded fluorescent tubes and sunlight.)
- 59. Tape Vault Library of Congress Says: Don¡¯t refrigerate Don¡¯t let humidity fluctuate Don¡¯t expose to UV rays, even fluorescents Additionally¡ Store in cases upright on end
- 60. ?
- 61. ?? Problems encountered Limited resources for hardware Limited testing outside the facility Difficulty accessing CMS from wireless network Bad timing for CONTENTdm upgrade So much stuff, so little time
- 62. ?? Lessons learned Project management You can't always get what you want. Empire building Importance of tracking and documenting
- 63. ?? Lessons learned Think beyond the PROJECT to the PROGRAM
- 64. ESTIMATES Convert -Digitize audio from cassette tape -Collect and combine scans into single document Describe Technical information Metadata
- 65. Convert Digitize audio from cassette tape to downloadable MP3. Collect tape from archive Assign capture settings Capture playback digitally Export archive file to WAV format Export patron file to MP3 format
- 66. Convert Digitize audio from cassette tape to downloadable MP3. Time estimate: 1.5 hours per speech approximate number of speeches in archive = 570 Time to digitize cassette archive = 855 hours Skill level: technical
- 67. Convert Digitize image scans into readable text files for download Collect DVD from archive Copy folder to internal drive Combine TIFFs into PDF Run text recognition software Optimize PDF for web download
- 68. Convert Digitize image scans into readable text files for download Time estimate: .25 hour per document Approximate number of speeches in archive = 1396 Time to digitize paper archive = 349 hours Skill level: clerical
- 69. Describe Name each file with pertinent?title Maintain organization within the project Attach metadata to each object for use in CONTENTdm Publish compound object to CONTENTdm and back up archived copies Time estimate: .5 hour per document Approximate number of speeches in archive = 1396 Time to?accurately?describe each object = 698 hours Skill level: Professional
- 70. Hardware Recommendations 2 2 terabyte external hard drives $175 Cassette Deck: TASCAM CD-A750 $630 http://tascam.com/product/cd-a750/ PC Audio Interface: $250 TASCAM US-800
- 71. Software Recommendations Audacity Adobe Acrobat Pro Microsoft Excel CONTENTdm project manager And hosted server
- 72. Software Recommendations ¡° I¡¯m Broke and can¡¯t afford fancy CMSs¡± ¡° My IT Department already hates me¡± ¡° Greenstone/Drupal/contentDM is beyond me¡±
- 73. ?
- 74. Important Resources : Technical Digital Collection Building Library of Congress, " Selection Criteria for Preservation Digital Reformatting " Columbia University, " Selection Criteria for Digital Imaging Projects "? University of California, " Selection Criteria for Digitization "? Harvard University, " Selection for Digitization: a Decision-Making Matrix "? National Agricultural Library, " Selection Criteria and Guidelines "? Oxford University, " Decision Matrices and Workflows " ?(Appendix B)? National Library of Australia Digitisation Policy , 2000-2004.
- 75. Important Resources: Organizational Bair, Sheila, Myung-Ja Han, and Jason Lee. (2010). Creating Metadata Best Practices for CONTENTdm Users. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications : DC-2010, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 20-22, 2010, 74-78. Campbell, Dermot, Edward Jones, and Martin Glavin. ¡°Audio quality assessment techniques¡ªA review, and recent developments.¡± Signal Processing ?89.8 (2009):1489-1500.? Academic Search Premier . EBSCO. Web. 21 Mar. 2011. Council on Library and Information Resources, and Library of Congress (2006). Capturing Analog Sound for Digital Preservation: Report of a Roundtable Discussion of Best Practices for Transferring Analog Discs and Tapes . Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources and Library of Congress. Miller, Mary Helen. "The Spoken Word, Searchable for Scholarship." Chronicle of Higher Education 56.37 (2010): A13. Professional Development Collection . EBSCO. Web. 10 Mar. 2011. Notess, Greg R. "Searching Beyond Text: Issues with Multimedia Searching." Online 24.5 (2000): 61. Professional Development Collection . EBSCO. Web. 12 Mar. 2011. Weig, E., Terry, K. & Lybarger, K (2007). Large scale digitization of oral history: A case study . D-Lib Magazine 13.
Editor's Notes
- #2: How Many People Have digitized pre-existing content for the Internet? Podcast? Youtube? How many people have created digital content for use on the internet?
- #3: Work at a Public Access Television station located in the Allen County Public Library
- #4: Interact with a moving image archive weekly
- #5: We digitize a portion of programs produced at the facility
- #6: with library productions receiving priority
- #8: Coincidentally all classes I¡¯ve recently completed
- #9: Interned last year at the Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library Working on the digitization of Quest Club of Fort Wayne cassette tapes
- #10: The rest of the presentation I¡¯ll talk first about what I did and then what I learned practically and theoretically
- #12: Lecture society presenting since 1911 Recording audio since 1974 Full of Area big wigs Tape Archive is housed in the Allen County Public Library
- #13: Portion of their mission statement
- #14: In this totally spontaneous and unstaged picture you see how the tapes are archived in the sub basement of the ACPL.
- #24: Hardware you¡¯ll need for digitizing the audio signal includes
- #26: An heir and a spare, can also be backed up on your network, depending on your storage and your relationship with your IT department.
- #27: Hard Drives fail¡it happens, especially when you are moving lots of information back and forth. I¡¯ve had 2 external video editing drives fail out 5 in the last 3 years.
- #28: Who here is familiar with Audacity? Love this program, Open Source, Can encode at High Quality standards.
- #29: As a CMS, it¡¯s hard to beat .tried the Open Source, GreenStone, also an option, even harder to use.
- #30: I used this to package the scanned Tiff files into Pdf.s and to run OCR
- #31: Microsoft Excel for Metadata entry and tab delimited file creation.
- #33: Created Master Document in excel and uploaded it to Google docs.
- #34: Fields are very modified Dublin Core
- #35: Name your file something that is meaningful to you.
- #38: Foxy respected sound engineer and inventor of Parametric equalization
- #39: The International Association for Sound and Video Archives?standard
- #42: Are the creators or creating organization still around? GO give them a demonstration.
- #43: Why collect and digitize special formats from your community? Well, listen to this¡
- #45: Don¡¯t have one? Don¡¯t have either? Start wide. These can protect you from becoming a Dumping ground for non useful material.
- #46: Subject, Age, Uniqueness, Quality, Quantity all factors to take into account
- #49: Don¡¯t let tapes in that can harm your hardware. Buy a bottle of 100% isopropyl alcohol and some lintless cotton swabs for your playback device heads. Sometime you have to let a tape go, especially if it is damaged and of questionable background.
- #50: Soft write errors are the number of recoverable non-critical write errors that are encountered, meaning that a write operation on a block first failed and the subsequent retry was successful. If soft write errors are seen, it may indicate the beginning of a problem. When more of these soft write errors are seen, then you should consider checking the media for damage and cleaning the device, which will usually improve the situation. If the errors start to become excessive, the device may require servicing or replacing. As soft write errors usually indicate driver problems,
- #51: Digital Formats become obsolete fast, Storage interfaces age out, how long is USB 1 gonna be around. Understand that you have to be the active custodian of digital resources.
- #52: Check your master and backup devices, do they work? Run disc analysis on a regular schedule
- #53: Why should you digitize audio collections if it¡¯s not really preservation?
- #56: Digital Preservation Format Digital Performer Adobe Sound Studio Pro Tools
- #57: Digital Preservation Format
- #58: COUNCIL on Library and Information Services, 2006. Very handy, track it down
- #59: Actual preservation of the item involves these steps
- #60: Actual preservation of the item involves these steps
- #61: Here you can see in the totally spontaneous and un-staged photo the excellent conditions the Quest Club tapes are stored in
- #64: Think about your institutional digitization philosophy, projects are great, they get the ball rolling but at some point you are going to need to standardize how projects move through their cycles.