Digital Audio Round Table
CO Alliance
September  11, 2009
9-12pm

Attendees:

Diana Sweeney and Andrew Dorfman-Regis; Robin Satterwhite-Colorado College; Aimee Brown-Mesa State College(phone); Helen Reed-UNC (phone); Diana Gunnels-UNC; Betty Meagher and Greg Colati-DU; Dennis Moser-Univ. of Wyoming; Nancy Hunter-CSU; Ed Fugikawa, Alex Ushakov, Jessica Branco-Colati, George Machovec, Alan Charnes, and Rose Nelson-CO Alliance

Action  Items

Survey- to determine Alliance libraries audio formats that they may consider digitizing and also equipment needs/capacity.  The point of the survey is to find out if there is interest in pursuing a collaborative project to Alliance library audio collections. 

JHOVE stand alone tool distribute and send to those interested

Look into grant opportunities for audio (Grammy foundation-fund audio related to music 30-50k range on grants

Audio and Digital collections

Inventory of Institutional Collections

Diana-Regis

Center for War Experience .

audio interviews from veterans. 

Mostly digital format but some analog.

Robin-Colorado College

Oral history of northwestern Colorado women (Homestead project) Retired CC librarian has volunteered to digitize them at home. Tapes have become very fragile. 

Have some podcasts that have been captured on campus and transcripts.

Music library-student performances, composition classes- Variety of formats mp3 , old tapes, etc.

Helen-UNC collections

Oral history in archival services some were digitized.  Some in analog format. 

Several music performance recordings.  Some will be video. 

Copyright is a concern: need right of work being performed and also of the original creator of the performance

Aimee-Mesa State College

A little bit of audio and old video and film.  Would like to put this into the ADR.    

She is also planning to capture audio from a Public History class next semester (spring 10')with plans to put this in the ADR as well 

Dennis-Wyoming

Photo journalism project-includes images, gps coordinates, and audio files in digital format. 

Interviews of early instructors in the education studies program.  These are in digital format and includes both audio and transcript files. 

Also have tapes in special collections-working on digitizing them now. 

 

Betty-DU

Beck Jewish History-only small part have metadata and transcripts, lots of oral histories.  Have digitized about 350. 

Music library has audio tapes-There are some copyright issues with this as well 

There is a move from video files to audio files.  This creates some challenges in dealing with the older formats.

Nancy Hunter-CSU

Programs that lend themselves to audio conversion: performing arts, merchandising and fashion programs. 

Students have become more interested in video. 

The library, as a repository, will likely be called on to take care of this program content

CSU doesn't have a large quantity of audio material that needs to be converted to digital format.  Most of it has been converted.

Holley-CU Boulder

1500 files of folk music collection digitized. 

Archive from big band era.  Copyright is always an issue. 

Andy-Regis

Smattering of other things audio, video, podcasts, gift collection hundreds of thousands of radio programs supposedly these are already digitized.  Not sure if they will hand over copyright. 

Will need to digitize a new collection called Kaleidoscope-Americana collection.

 

Jessica summarized  main points of discussion:

Rights and usage, guidelines about creation, conversion, sound model collections at many institutions.  Transcriptions-are very laborious to work with requires a lot of manual effort in transcribing.

Copyright is a large concern for all institutions.

What resources have you looked at in determining rights?

CU Boulder used legal notification to contact descendants of the performers from the Folk Collection. Sound Model  recommended doing this to cover copyright issues.   

CC-Some people interviewed signed release forms.  Release was before the age of the web.  Trying to go back on oral histories and contact descendants.

Who's responsible for copyright?

Depends on project- at DU the Archive department was responsible for copyright. 

Getting release forms upfront so they don't have to go back retrospectively and get them from descendants.  It's much more difficult to get them after the fact.

Holley mentioned that Naropa has a great release form on available in the CDP.  

There was also a question about who you need to get release forms from.  There seemed to be consensus that as long as there was a disclaimer of "this is being recorded" at the beginning of a lecture or program, this should cover any copyright obligations.  This seems to be the common practice in recording lectures.

Intellectual property is another issue-what does university own versus what do faculty own?

Best Practices

Most institutions are using CDP's Audio best practices.  

Some institutions do the routine day-to-day projects in-house and outsource   large projects

DU-has outsourced to an in-house department that has the equipment and staff to support digitization.   

CC-has created their own best practices.  They would be interested in outsourcing audio conversion projects, as only one person works on this, so there are some staffing concerns.

Wyoming-have some born digital projects such as the Photo journalism project.  All projects are done in-house in Dennis' office.  Also using CDP best practices.

 

Holley-CU mentioned that within the CDP best practices there are different levels of standards-minimum, recommended and optimal.  Libraries must decide when to use the various levels.  The type of level will be dictated by the project.  For example, if space is a concern, a library may want to choose the recommended level over the optimum level.  It also depends on the type of collection whether you use recommended or optimal.  For example, voice may require a lower level, while music may require the optimal standard.  Master s may be higher quality were the view files are a lower resolution so require a lesser standard.

Wyoming is basing their storage planning for digital files on an optimum level. 

Regis-Have digitized for access rather than archival purposes.  Don't have capacity to generate the metadata for archival purposes this is in reference to just their audio and video files. 

Metadata

Nancy mentioned that getting technical metadata was a problem for CSU -.  The repository software will do an extract of metadata for access files, but not for master files. This is a problem because it leads to inaccuracies.  For example, the  date of digitization becomes the date that the item was created.  Masters are too big for their software to handle.  Only ingesting  jp2 images.  CSU doesn't have a streaming server server so they aren't able to provide access from the repository to entire oral histories. 

Jhov,  which stands for JSTOR/Harvard Object Validation Environment, was created by JSTOR and Harvard University. Jhove is a type of softwarethat both CSU and CU(stand alone client of Jhove) use to extract embedded metadata from a digital object. It captures things like playing time and date of creation. 

Alex pointed out that some older files don't have this embedded metadata.  However, Jessica mentioned that anything that has been CDP converted does have this embedded metadata.

Holley mentioned that MIX can be extracted from the JHOVE record by using  XXLT.

Do you let contributors generate their own metadata are there standards or guidelines?

Greg explained that the DU-School of social work generates metadata and then the library converts and maps it over.  In other situations the library creates the metadata.  Sometimes it's easier just to have the catalogers do it.  Quality control is always a concern.  Diana mentioned that it may be difficult to create metadata when you have a large number of files.  In these cases, it may be better to have user generated metadata. 

Collaboration between Alliance libraries on digital conversion

Areas in which libraries could collaborate: Equipment, skills, staff

Access to the college's equipment is a concern for some campuses.  The equipment is not owned/shared with the library. 

CSU has combed computing services with library services so there is an opportunity for collaboration between units.

Jessica raised the question about training 3-4 people at the Alliance who could work on digitizing collections across the alliance. 

Someone else mentioned taking CDPs approach of placing imaging (audio visual) centers in various locations. 

There may be grant funding available for these types of endeavors I fthey were Colorado specific collections.  

Diana raised the idea of doing a pilot project.  This may provide a model for future digital projects.  Also, if the Alliance did a pilot project it may serve as a model for applying for grant funds for a future endeavor. 

Audio File conversion

Alex mentioned that it wasn't difficult, time consuming or expensive to convert audio files.  Most institutions have audio in vinyl, reel and audio tape-A single person could do this process.  Sound editing can be done on a regular PC. One tape reader is enough. 

What kind of media do you have? -is a good question for the survey, Alex explained.   

Survey of institutions analog files and equipment/Audio Project among Alliance libraries

Jessica mentioned that she would put together a survey about what types of analog equipment and formats institutions have to find out if there is a strong need and desire to implement an audio conversion project among Alliance libraries.    This would be a good way to leverage the consortia to do a group purchase through BCR and Air Show.  The survey would provide a quick analysis of some of the older formats that institutions have.

George commented that Airshow services may be great for converting obscure formats that you only have one or two of.  Nancy mentioned that leasing equipment for a pilot project may make more sense than purchasing it.     

A question was raised about transcribing audio and the challenges with this.   Sound Model did this, but the correction process is very time consuming. 

Greg mentioned that voice transcribing software is still not optimal for this type of conversion process.   

 

Access Expectations:

Jessica asked if selling is a concern in digitizing and making available audio collections.  For example, perhaps an organization such as NPR or individual like Ken Burns would like to purchase a particular audio file or performance.  How would an institution handle this?  Some participants mentioned that selling is really only a concern if someone wants to purchase a master file, because access level copies are going to be MP3s. It's more likely that cost recovery is an issue in distributing content. 

Another issue is that institution may not own all the rights to certain performances. 

Greg mentioned the hope of being able to stream out the audio and allow people to listen to just a segment of the entire file.   These segments or markers  are called clip points. 

A point was raised about other projects that are assigning metadata to media projects.  The following projects/locations have implemented media projects and have applied metadata. 

Indiana, Ohio, DU, Stanford (open source) UC  Santa Barbara-Psychology dept.  Texas Legacy Project-conservation history assoc.

Dennis mentioned  the Texas Legacy project at http://texaslegacy.org/   This project uses clip points that allows you to bookmark your files.  For example, you can find a place within an audio interview on this project and bookmark that specific segment. 

Wyoming is attempting to use clip points in their audio/digital project.

Jessica mentioned that the ADR could look at these various projects to find out what types of viewers the ADR might consider adopting.

It's important to prevent downloading in some cases if there are copyright restrictions on saving files. A  streaming server will prevent downloads. 

ADR staff is currently experimenting with FFmpeg-streaming audio software.  Fez uses this. You can't download and save a file, but it does put it into a temp file available in cache. 

Holley mentioned that authentication/authorization is also a pertinent issue in terms of access to audio.  Some content requires authentication depending on digital rights.  The ADR will need to know this to be sure to apply the correct authentication for various types of content from different institutions.

 

Meeting Adjourned.