Hi Chuck and all, In addition to the great resources Deb has suggested, two other leads:
The Association of Recorded Sound Collections, ARSC, has institutional members who do audio A-to-D in-house but occasionally outsource those services, and other members who provide those services as vendors. ARSC has an active email list, which it may be worth hitting with a query seeking off-list replies about prospective service providers. More at: http://www.arsc-audio.org/arsclist.html One lead to an audio digitization house: Sonicraft (sonicraft.com) does very high-quality transfers of music recordings. This recommendation is based on individual experience, not museum-related work. As we know, a key factor in whether any given shop is a good candidate for a project is the eternal tradeoff between transfer quality and cost, vis-?-vis the amount and type of source material, how much quality matters, and budget. Please ask me off-list if you'd like a lead to someone who may have ideas for a specific project. As a LinkedIn user, you might also see if you happen to have connections in the Audio Engineering Society (aes.org) via http://www.linkedin.com/groups?viewMembers=&gid=71239 . Re: storage media, in a word: yes, once audio is digital, physical storage-medium aspects of preserving it are like those of preserving other digital files. Re: metadata, the AES has developed some relevant standards, and LOC digital preservation pages may be useful re: what can be embedded in audio files of a specified format (e.g., WAV): http://www.aes.org/publications/standards/ http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/fdd000001.shtml hope this helps! Rob (recording engineer in a pre-museum-person life) -- Rob Lancefield Manager of Museum Information Services / Registrar of Collections Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University 301 High Street, Middletown CT 06459-0487 USA rlancefield [at] wesleyan [dot] edu | tel. 860.685.2965 Past President, Museum Computer Network (MCN), http://www.mcn.edu On 9/15/2010 7:29 PM, Chuck Patch wrote: > I've been asked about services that perform digitization of analog > audio (reel-to-reel) tapes. Has anyone used such a service that they > could recommend? A couple of related questions - are there digital > storage media for audio considered remotely archival? Or is it > similar to visual data that's best kept on spinning disk and migrated > in perpetuity? What types of meta-data can one ask a service provider > of this sort to embed in the files?
