Tools for Audio Preservation:
The Sound Directions Project

Download Presentation (ppt).................... . Speaker Bios

David Ackerman
Lead Engineer for the Harvard College Library’s Audio Preservation Service

Mike Casey
Co-chair of the ARSC Technical Committee and Associate Director for Recording Services, Archives of Traditional Music, Indiana University

Sound Directions is a research and development collaboration between Harvard University and Indiana University funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities in the U.S. The project is charged with developing detailed best practices and testing emerging standards for the preservation of audio in the digital domain. One output from the project has been the development of software tools to aid and automate parts of the preservation process. Harvard has developed a suite of 40+ cross-platform command line software utilities, designed to be interfaced together through batch/shell scripts. The resulting scripts form audio and metadata processing workflows that automate routine and mundane tasks in the audio preservation process. Indiana University has created FACET—the Field Audio Collection Evaluation Tool—to assess the preservation condition and level of risk carried by recorded sound collections. Indiana has also developed a technical metadata collection tool to gather and store data on source audio objects, digital files created during transfer, and the preservation transfer process.

 

David Ackerman
David Ackerman is senior audio engineer and manager of Harvard College Library Audio Preservation Services. He also co-chairs the SC-03-06 committee on audio metadata and TC-ARDL on archiving, restoration and digital libraries for the Audio Engineering Society.

Mike Casey
Mike Casey has training and experience as both an audio engineer and a sound archivist and is currently the Associate Director for Recording Services at the Archives of Traditional Music (ATM) at Indiana University. He manages all access/preservation transfer and restoration work for the ATM's 110,000 audio recordings dating from the 1890's to the present. From 1987 to 1993 he headed the Southern Folklife Collection in the Manuscripts Department at the University of North Carolina as the Department's Sound and Image Librarian. In 1993 he "ran away to join the circus," touring in the US and Canada with Cucanandy, a band that performed traditional Irish music and dance and used archival resources in developing repertoire. Now back in the world of archives, he is working on the ATM's collaboration with Harvard University's Archive of World Music to develop a sustainable, long-term, system for preserving audio in the digital domain. This initiative, funded by NEH as a research and development project, is titled Sound Directions: Digital Preservation and Access for Global Audio Heritage. Mike is also currently Co-chair of the ARSC (Association for Recorded Sound Collections) Technical Committee.