Re: [ARSCLIST] Mass Digitization

["Richard L. Hess" <arclists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 07:36 PM 2007-05-17, George Brock-Nannestad wrote:
Many good things which I have snipped. Read his post.

I think we need to go back to the work that is being done by the 
folks at IU and Mike Casey's (and others') FACET program.

FACET (the tool) ranks the RISK to the collection (a collection is a 
homogeneous group of recordings from the same time on the 
same/similar carriers)

The entire PROCESS takes the FACET ranking and combines it with an 
IMPORTANCE ranking by those people who worry about the importance.

Combining the RISK and the IMPORTANCE gives a pretty useful metric 
for prioritizing and funding restoration projects.

I think that in this discussion we need to separate the discussions 
about RISK (already well-documented in the FACET tool and perhaps a 
similar tool coming from Columbia University) and the IMPORTANCE 
which is a variable based on the perception of the group doing the 
ranking. There will never be complete agreement but then again, there 
doesn't need to be as long as the funders buy into the ranker's 
vision of importance.

The funders need to realize that there needs to be a plan going 
forward in perpetuity once the decision has been made to preserve a 
given collection.

I do think that George's work in dividing the purposes into:
    nostalgia
    audio history
    scientific analysis
is useful.

In the AES paper, George makes the points that archives are in the 
business of delivering copies, not preserving the content and that is 
also key to understanding.

I think Tom Fine has been saying for a long time that not everything 
needs to be preserved. The questions as to how to most effectively 
make that judgment is far more difficult than how to splice or resplice tapes.

Also, as to the tape prep questions, I seem to find time to do the 
prep while I'm ingesting other recordings when I have a large project 
in front of me.

Cheers,

Richard



Richard L. Hess                   email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Aurora, Ontario, Canada       (905) 713 6733     1-877-TAPE-FIX
Detailed contact information: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.