Re: [ARSCLIST] Mass Digitization / the gear DOES exist, what next??]

[Jim Lindner <jim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Glad to see that this has turned out to be such an active thread.  
Here are a few "datapoints" of information that may help based on  
some of the points raised.

First - in the metadata arena - there has been a great deal of work  
done in the AV area over the past 5 years - so do not despair that  
appropriate metadata dictionaries and structures appropriate for AVdo  
not exist. They do - and several of them - that may be a problem in  
and of itself - but several of you think that there has not been work  
done in this area - or work that is appropriate done - and that is  
not the case. You can start with MPEG-7 as something to look at -  
there is a tremendous amount of information available as well as  
tools available. Here is one place to start your journey:
http://vega.icu.ac.kr/~mccb-lab/publications/Paper/ 
Ryu_ACM_Multimedia2002.pdf

Another recent effort by PBS is here:
http://www.pbcore.org/

and there are several others including a european effort P/META and  
interchange mechanisms between different systems:
http://www.ebu.ch/en/technical/trev/trev_284-hopper.pdf

There are efforts that are more particularly structured to the  
library community needs like Mets (no not the baseball team...)
http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/

and there are many others - but to say that this work has not been  
done is not correct. Plenty of work has been done - no wheel needs to  
be reinvented in this particular area.

There has also been a great deal of work done on repositories - and  
definitions of what they are, and are not. A good place to start is  
OAIS which was originally a NASA effort but has been continued and  
expanded by OCLC and RLG and the library community in general. There  
is a ton of information - here is one place to start:
http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/archive/2000/lavoie/
and here:
http://www.rlg.org/en/pdfs/pm_framework.pdf
and you can google your way from here.

There have also been "organizations" involved on many different  
levels - NDIPP is one that has been in the news very recently - a  
$100 million public/private sector effort (currently threatened it  
seems).
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/partners/
an article about it yesterday
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/15/ 
AR2007051501873.html:

And this is just one - there are many efforts underway on an  
international basis - and the problem is not always money. There  
projects underway that have major funding support in many countries.  
Sweden is one, The Netherlands is another, in the USA the Library of  
Congress NAVCC is a very large effort.

The efforts that I believe that this community can best help with are  
the technical ones - and specifically - starting to think very  
differently about mass migration and how it can and has to be done.  
To say that no machine can do what a skilled operator can do - may  
not be true - but whether it is or not, is in my opinion besides the  
point. IF you have 100 tapes to consider preserving - fine - that may  
be a worthwhile discussion - but when you have 500 Million of them -  
then that is a very different story. In fact many machines are  
possible that do as good or better work then humans - particularly if  
the work is repetitive - and can do work to far better tolerences  
then humans are capable of. I don't think that this is a very  
difficult argument - just look at your lcd screen on your computer -  
or your keyboard. Machines CAN do good work. What is required,  
however, is for this field to start thinking differently - about  
working on a much larger scale then it has ever done - and to discuss  
precisely how that can happen. The Prestospace project has done a  
great deal of work in this area - they have developed a non-contact  
Magneto Optical head for the playback of 1/4" recordings. They have  
developed a non-contact technique for playback of 78's (actually  
there are a few of those efforts underway internationally), the  
splicing machine I mentioned - and many more. But this is just a start.

One person made a comment about giving me blank checks - while I  
appreciate the tongue and cheek humor - I clearly stated that we  
would appreciate MORE competition - MORE input - MORE ideas. The task  
is far too big for any single vendor - and far too big for one or  
even a half dozen different approaches. I hope this information is  
helpful




Jim Lindner

Email: jim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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On May 18, 2007, at 12:58 PM, Bertram Lyons wrote:

> Steven Smolian <smolians@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>   ***Does an organization exist that  can
> oversee such a task without klutzing it up with too many initial
> formal  concerns?
>
>   ***And would that organization be the AES, ARSC, SAA or some other
> entity, perhaps one hosted and overseen by the preservation office
> of the LOC? The  more I think about it, the more I feel the mission
> of the host should be preservation, one that has a visceral
> understanding of audio issues.
>
>
> Is this not the charge of the National Recording Preservation Board at
> the Library of Congress? The National Recording Preservation Act of
> 2000 created this Board to (1) assess and study the state of audio
> preservation in the US and to (2) develop best practice standards  
> for a
> comprehensive national audio preservation program.
>
> I know they have put out a few reports recently:
> http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub137/contents.html. It seems this
> Board should be covering much of what has been discussed in this
> thread. Does anyone know of their current progress?
>
> Bertram Lyons
>
> Project Manager / Dissemination Coordinator
> Association for Cultural Equity
> Alan Lomax Archive
> 450 West 41st Street, Room 606
> New York, NY 10036
> 901-508-6631
> www.culturalequity.org