Thursday, August 25, 2011

The Conference on World Affairs Archive Online: Digitization and Metadata for a Digital Audio Pilot.

The Conference on World Affairs Archive Online: Digitization and Metadata for a Digital Audio Pilot.  Michael Dulock, Holley Long.  D-Lib Magazine. March/April 2011.
The University of Colorado Archives began a project to digitize a sample set of 80 tapes from their substantial collection of audio recordings. To prepare for the project the Media Specialist inspected a sampling of the audio in the collection to determine media formats and the collection's condition. The media specialist also listened to the selection of materials to rate the sound quality on a scale of excellent, very good, good, fair, or poor.  In addition to the media's age, playback equipment for analog audio formats is becoming increasingly more difficult to acquire and maintain.

They followed the technical  recommendations in the Collaborative Digitization Program's Digital Audio Best Practices. The team chose to digitize the materials at the recommended 44.1 kHz and 24 bit, since these specifications adequately capture the spoken word.

With existing metadata, volunteers added descriptive summaries and topical keywords.  The project used several schemas:  Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary Project (PBCore) for the audio, qualified Dublin Core for text documents, and Visual Resources Association Core metadata 4.0 (VRA Core) for photographs and other images.

No comments: