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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 55 | February 2002


Four Meetings and a Conference

Kevin Bradley

Kevin Bradley in Budapest for the Audio Engineering Society conference on sound preservation

The world of digital audio-visual archiving is in a flurry of animated change. The hardware and software that stores and manages digital materials are beginning to match the expectations held by archivists of electronic materials. Further, the international realisation amongst libraries and archives that in order to manage, exchange and preserve digital materials we must collaborate on standards, particularly in metadata and formats, has given the sound archive community access to many tools that traditionally emanate from libraries. From these technological bricks, the commercial IT sector is building relationships with the archiving community to produce solutions to the issues of archiving digital materials.

PRESTO, the first in the sequence of meetings and conferences attended, is the name for the Preservation Technologies group. A 21 month, 4.8 million Euro project funded out of the European Commission Fifth Framework Programme in Information Society Technologies, Cultural Heritage Applications, PRESTO is chaired by Richard Wright from BBC Information and Archives. PRESTO's stated aims are to develop state-of-the-art technology in the preservation of film, video and audio media. The principal partners reflect the largest archives in Europe: BBC (UK), INA (FRANCE) and RAI (ITALY). There are, however, a number of partners from a wide range of European based technical design and consulting companies, such as video transfer company, VectraCom; digitisation, delivery and mass storage providers E-Vod; NTEC-a media, independent non-profit research organisation; Joanneum Research; Advanced Computer Systems (ACS); engineering consultants Snell and Willcox, and the Istituto Trentino di Cultura (ITC) an Institute for base and applied research, both in humanities and in science-technology. The project has identified current costs per hour based on the total life cycle cost, and estimated that the European holding of audio material alone was more than 20 million hours. Resources are consequently significant, and the project aims to encourage development of technologies that improve the efficiency of bulk preservation processes (see http://presto.joanneum.ac.at/index.asp).

Budapest, host city of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) 20th international conference: 'Archiving, Restoration, and New Methods of Recording', and the first AES has held on sound preservation, is known for many things, including its baths for which its citizens have a passion. The Rudas baths, built in 1560, are not the oldest, nor even the grandest, yet the 10 metre stone dome supported by eight columns provides, nonetheless, for a dramatic set of baths.

Archivists often contemplate why certain objects survive and others do not, and this is an increasingly important subject in digital archiving as we now make conscious decisions about what will survive. Chris Clark, editor for the International Association of Sound and Audio Visual Archives (IASA), believes that we as archivists and librarians must consciously address this change. He asked of the final session of the IASA conference, which considered a presentation on PANDORA, the National Library of Australia's selective online archive, 'We, the audience, needed to consider whether a subtle shift in the collecting imperative was being suggested: collecting for a specific purpose rather than collecting just in case someone asks for it?'

Some suggest that objects like the Rudas baths survive because of the materials from which they are constructed. Certainly stone is a resilient material, resistant to the ravages of time, but in the dome of the Rudas baths the curve of the ceiling is not preserved by stone, but in the relationship between the stone blocks. It is no different with digital objects. The data itself can be preserved as a series of binary codes, but they are as meaningless as a pile of stone bricks unless the relationship between them is maintained.

The AES conference, 'Archiving, Restoration, and New Methods of Recording', covered issues ranging from life expectancy of magnetic tapes, presentations on research in nano-electronics in data storage, through to ethics of replay and digital encoding. Metadata, however, is the mortar that is used to preserve the relationship between the digital bricks, and a large proportion of the available conference time was apportioned to this subject. The various schemas being proposed for different media and different usages and even naming requirements means that collecting institutions need to make pragmatic decisions about the local implementation of the metadata scheme, while maintaining the ability to map their databases against other standards. The next few years of standards development are critical to the emerging digital archive community.

When Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of The British Library, opened the IASA/ARSC conference in the magnificent new buildings of the British Library, she prepared some statistics on the structure, including the number of bricks. Yet it is not the building that makes any library, but the collection, and after some modest architectural bragging, she urged participants to view their work with sound recording collections as a special, but not separate, part of the library and archive community. Collections within larger organisations, she claimed, needed to integrate their activities in order to gain from and play a part in the new possibilities afforded by new technology.

The joint conference between International Association of Sound and Audio Visual Archives (IASA) and the Association of Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) was in fact ARSC's first conference outside of the USA, and this led to some initial concerns regarding attendance after the events of September 11th. However, there were very few cancellations, and a wide mixture of participants from ARSC and IASA, considered the conference theme, 'Why Collect?'

The foundation of IASA is its technical committees and working groups, and these groups meet before and during the IASA conference. The IASA Technical Committee (TC) met on the weekend leading to the conference proper.

This was something of a unique meeting, as since the inception of the IASA TC, Dr Dietrich Schüller has remained unopposed chair. However, though his retirement is still some years off, Dietrich has reduced his involvement in international committee work. Lars Gaustad (Norway) was elected chair of the TC, with George Boston (UK) secretary and the Kevin Bradley (AUS) as the vice chair.

The TC announced the formal finalisation of TC 03, the latest IASA standards document, Standards, Recommended Practices and Strategies, (www.llgc.org.uk/iasa/iasa0013.htm). These general guidelines are intended to be used to aid the safeguarding of the audio heritage and was written in answer to requests from the members of IASA for advice about the direction to take in an increasingly digital environment. The TC is currently working on guidelines for digitisation of audio materials and the stability of CD-R as a storage format to be published as 'Digitisation of Audio-Procedural and Technical Advice for Archives from the Technical Committee'.

Those who are of that turn of mind will have noticed that there were only two meetings and actually two conferences, and I plead aesthetic licence. However, it is more important to notice that the advice and standards that comes from these meetings are the building blocks of the future of electronic archiving, and that through the maintenance of such fruitful relationships will we build a successful archival community.
—Kevin Bradley

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