Re: [ARSCLIST] MP3 bit rates and usage factors for Web pages

[David Seubert <seubert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've been out of town and I'm just catching up with ARSClist, but here 
are some of my thoughts related to Richard's question and the discussion 
that followed:

1) If rights allow you to, put it online and let people download it. 
Yes, you lose some control, but in cases of real infringement beyond 
what you state people are allowed to do with the material, you can 
always turn the lawyers loose on them. We recently licensed a recording 
from our collection to Norton for the new book that just came out on 
Richard Feynman and we charged them a lot of money. That particular 
recording is not online, but we do have Linus Pauling material from the 
same collection online that is free to download. If somebody wanted the 
Pauling material for similar commercial purposes, we would still charge 
them a lot of money even though it is online. Free access online does 
not ruin the market for commercial exploitation nor does it mean you 
give up your rights to control what people do with things. Some people 
may sell bootlegs on ebay, but legit users like Norton are going to 
license it properly.

2) There is perceived value to higher bitrate recordings. For our 
cylinders, we determined that 96kbits was sufficient. However, we used 
128kbit because people perceive 96kbit mp3s to be of low quality, even 
if they capture every last bit of frequency response. You could also use 
VBR which is becoming more common.

3) Streaming is great, but it requires extra infrastructure. It is 
helpful to be able to stream material so people don't have to download 
large files to see if the material is actually of interest to them, but 
it requires a dedicated server and a separate set of files. We've found 
that given a choice people download more than they stream by a wide 
margin. I can't give you exact figures, but people want to grab it and 
go. Restricting to streaming might be a possibility if there are rights 
issues that don't allow you to provide downloads. Yes, people can 
capture audio streams with software, but that's breaking the law. People 
also knife plates out of books which is also illegal, but we don't shut 
our doors as a precaution. We should do our best to maximize use and 
minimize risks and get on with things.

4) If copyright and/or donor agreements allow you to, give them the 
whole recording online, not an excerpt. Why are we obsessed with 
control? Do we want to evaluate the character or scholarly credentials 
of each user before deciding to grant them access? That's been the 
history at some institutions (I'm not naming names), but it is 
antithetical to my way of thinking and is a waste of the archivist's and 
the researcher's time. Over the past two weeks people have downloaded 
over 200,000 mp3 files from our cylinder website. That is more use of 
our historical audio collection (78s and cylinders) than the collection 
has seen in its 30+ year existence by several orders of magnitude. 
Granted, giving away music online is like handing out dope at a Grateful 
Dead show and you won't find this kind of traffic for an oral history 
collection, but the principle is the same. I'm just really glad that I 
didn't have to process each one of these requests individually!

David Seubert
UCSB