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Re: [ARSCLIST] Mass Digitization



Thanks to everyone involved for taking the time to spread some knowledge
and helping make this a very informative thread. My blank check
statement was purely tongue in cheek, and pointed more to the quick
acceptance of a solution, than the money aspect. And Jim, I respect your
being a pioneer in the field before I even considered it as a career.

I believe there's common agreement that we need more competition, input,
and ideas. There's plenty of seats at the table, technology to develop,
standards to adapt, and hours of media to transfer; but we must all be
willing to accept new ideas, and let go of some of our entrenched
understandings.

Let's keep dialog rolling, but I for one, have a bunch of links below to
check out. 

Don Andes
Director of Archives
EMI Music

-----Original Message-----
From: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List
[mailto:ARSCLIST@xxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Jim Lindner
Sent: Friday, May 18, 2007 11:05 AM
To: ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Mass Digitization / the gear DOES exist, what
next??]

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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   SAMMA Systems LLC.
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and access practices.


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
>

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