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Article Excerpt
During the past two decades, the capacity of the personal computer to capture, store, deliver, and play sound has revolutionized audio services in libraries. The computer audio technology of the 1980s allowed librarians to begin transferring sound from deteriorating or obsolete media to more stable formats, and more recently, advances in network speed, audio compression, and streaming technology have offered libraries opportunities to extend access to their sound recording collections in ways that were barely imaginable a decade ago. Users are now able to listen to recordings remotely, they can listen at different points of the same recording simultaneously, and they have easy access to recordings that were once restricted because of their condition or format.
In describing these new collections of digitized sound, music librarians have used a number of terms, the most common of which is "digital music library," a natural extension of "digital library," widely used to describe digitization projects in libraries. The libraries comprising the Digital Library Federation have arrived at the following definition of "digital libraries":
Organizations that provide the resources, including the specialized staff, to select, structure, offer intellectual access to, interpret, distribute, preserve the integrity of, and ensure the persistence over time of collections of digital works so that they are readily and economically available for use by a defined community or set of communities. (1)
In 2000, Amanda Maple and Tona Henderson described the issues that must be confronted by a librarian planning a digital music library project, and explained the decisions made for their own project at Pennsylvania State University. (2) The issues fall into three broad categories: infrastructure (including the selection of hardware, software, streaming technology, and method of access); collections (including decisions on what to digitize and why, and related questions of copyright); and staffing (including who does what, who employs them, how the work is funded, and who provides training and public service).
In 1999, when Maple and Henderson wrote their article, no more than fifteen libraries were digitizing audio, but since then, dozens of libraries have mounted digitization projects, and the number continues to grow. Now that a substantial base of digital music library projects is in place, we can assess how librarians have dealt with the issues identified by Maple and Henderson. In order to collect information on the projects, I distributed a note on MLA-L (3) on 10 January 2002 asking librarians engaged in digital audio projects to participate in a survey. I sent questionnaires to the fifty respondents, and thirty-five were completed and returned. In preparation for the present article, I sent a note to these initial thirty-five respondents in July 2002 asking for updated information. At the same time, I issued a second call on MLA-L and received eight more responses, yielding a total of forty-three responses. The respondents represent forty-two libraries: thirty-seven university libraries and five college li braries (see table 1).
PRESERVATION AND ACCESS
The principal work of the projects undertaken by these forty-two libraries falls into two broad categories: reformatting rare recordings or recordings in obsolete formats, and making high-demand recordings more easily available to the public--in other words, projects that provide preservation and access, activities that have been closely linked during the past two decades.
Historically, preservation and access have been seen in opposition: materials are preserved by restricting access to them, and in turn, providing access to materials endangers their preservation. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, initiatives to reformat materials--by transferring the sound from a wax cylinder to reel-to-reel tape, for example--allowed librarians to preserve materials by shifting access away from the original to a surrogate. The process of reformatting achieves the goals of both access and preservation, and they become reciprocal activities. Rather than standing in opposition, one supports the other. Paula De Stefano, who outlines this history in a recent set of essays on preservation, observes that "Preservation and access share a correlative relationship: One directly implies the other. They also share a causal relationship: The need for access to an item triggers the need to preserve it, just as the preservation of an item provides continued access." (4)
De Stefano notes that libraries embarked on mircofilming projects in the 1980s primarily to preserve materials; although increased access was a recognized benefit, it held only secondary importance. (The same could be said of contemporaneous sound preservation projects using tape as a preservation medium.) De Stefano argues that with the introduction of digitization, the driving force behind reformatting is now access rather than preservation, and in fact the distinction between the two has become blurred:
Today, with the emergence of electronic information, access has become even more consequential. Without electronic access to machine-readable information, for all practical purposes, the information might as well not exist. It is at this point that the relationship between preservation and access becomes more than reciprocal--it becomes almost synonymous. In the digital world, access supersedes preservation. (5)
In the realm of print materials, the benefits that digitization offers to access are unquestioned, but preservationists continue to debate the value of digitization as a method for long-term preservation. The principal concern is that the digital files themselves pose short-term preservation problems. According to Janet Gertz, director of preservation at Columbia University,
To date no one can prove that any digital version will survive and still be accessible beyond a few decades, despite much talk about migration and emulation, especially considering the repeated intervention these will require. ... Lacking agreed-upon mechanisms for this assurance, and lacking longevity, digital copies alone cannot constitute preservation. (6)
The proposed solution to the longevity problem articulated by Gertz and others has been to take a "hybrid" approach to preservation--maintain traditional methods of preservation, and digitize only for the benefit of access: "For now, the desired goal must be to exploit the access capabilities of digital technology and combine them with the longevity of proven preservation methods." (7)
For print materials, the proven preservation method continues to be a transfer of the image to microfilm, so a combination of microfilming and scanning comfortably meets the goals of both preservation and access. For sound recordings, however, such a simple solution does not exist. A hybrid approach is not possible because the traditional medium for sound recording preservation, reel-to-reel tape, does not meet the requirements of long-term preservation. Tape is reliable for one or two decades compared to at least five hundred years for microfilm. (8)
In fact, some sound preservationists now argue that the media used to store digital sound are more reliable than magnetic tape. Samuel Brylawski, head of the Recorded Sound Section at the Library of Congress, recently argued that
[d]igital media have the advantage of not suffering any loss of information as they are copied, unlike the generational losses inherent in the duplication of analog media such as discs and cassette tape. The future of audio preservation is reformatting audio tapes and discs to computer files and systematically managing those files in a repository. (9)
At the December 2000 conference Folk Heritage Collections in Crisis, Elizabeth Cohen argued that the digitization of sound recordings cannot be postponed until the...
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