Critical choices, critical decisions: sound archiving and changing technology

Abstract

In a relatively short period of time sound archivists have had to come to terms with some fundamental paradigm shifts in the way they approach sound archiving. For example, in December 1997, in response to the first recommendation of Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, the Commonwealth Government announced that the National Library would be funded to develop and manage a new oral history project. At that time the National Library's well developed sound preservation strategy was at an interim stage between digital and analogue. It involved the production of analogue reel, CD and cassette duplicates of the original DAT tape using high end digital audio workstations (DAW) designed for post production of audio materials. By the time the project had reached its completion date in 2002, reel tapes had become more difficult to purchase, CD-R stock was much cheaper and of generally lower quality, DAWs specifically for audio preservation were available, and the Library had refocused its digital preservation strategy so that it relied on the Digital Object Storage System (DOSS), an in-house digital mass storage system (DMSS). The development of DMSSs brings closer the vision of a persistent and replicable archive to which sound archivists have aspired, however it also raises many issues that were not envisaged under the earlier strategies. These include the incorporation and transfer of existing digital and analogue to the storage system, the management of adequate descriptive and preservation metadata, the management of that data, the choice of carrier from which to transfer, (preservation CD or original carrier?) and many other new dilemmas with which to wrestle. These issues, coupled with the disappearance of adequate replay equipment from the market, render critical the timing and planning of what will clearly be the last transfer from a discrete carrier to an integrated system.