Studio Monitor

SAFEGUARDING, PART 2: Last week, Dr. Elizabeth Cohen of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) discussed the future of archiving with regard to the first 50 recordings recently chosen for the National Recording Registry.

As the AES is a member of the National Recording Preservation Board, the society advised Librarian of Congress James H. Billington on his selection of recordings, which range from a group of the Edison Exhibition Recordings from 1888-1889 to "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five almost a century later, in 1982.

Cohen—AES past president, member of the AES Technical Committee on Archiving, Restoration and Digital Libraries, and founding chair of the AES Technical Committee on Network Audio Systems—advocates the migration to a digital format both for archiving and public access. Sam Brylawski, head of Recorded Sound at the Library of Congress, confirms that such a migration is under way. Given the magnitude of both the recordings in question and such a transition, however, a definitive preservation format has not been chosen.

"The library hasn't endorsed a digital-audio format as yet," Brylawski says. "Right now, we need to explore how to go about making the decision. It will be interesting to see what kind of process we go through in order to do that, but I can't tell you yet what it's going to be. Everybody sees the writing on the wall in terms of digital preservation, but they're not quite ready to say, 'This is the way we're going to go forever.' "

Brylawski says that some funding is included with the National Recording Registry's announcement, a result of the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000; but the library is being conservative with regard to hiring for the work that lies ahead. "Congress has commissioned a study with this money," he says, "so we want to save some money this fiscal year for the study on preservation issues. We don't want to build a bureaucracy with it; we want to devote it to preservation."

The process is, after all, in its infancy: obtaining recordings from rights holders has just begun, and that too will present certain challenges. "In some cases, we're going to have to deal with what we get from the rights holders, because we're not going to have access to the originals," Brylawski says. "In some cases, we're just beginning to contact the companies through names that were provided to us by the Recording Industry Assn. of America. We want to approach them and say, 'This is selected, can we work together to acquire the best copy possible?,' which, in most cases, is that copy closest to the original. Where we do the preservation, it would be 96[kHz]/24-bit files. The actual physical format is irrelevant to us, because we know that it's going to be maintained in systems and migrated as necessary."

As Brylawski notes, the preservation community looks to the Library of Congress. "I know I do," says Alan Stoker, audio/video curator at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville. Stoker has continued to archive to quarter-inch tape at 15 inches-per-second, and, pending adequate funding, hopes to acquire equipment to transfer the Hall of Fame's rarest 78 rpm discs to digital files for convenient public access.

"I have not currently changed the format here because I'm really waiting to see what they do, what standards they adopt," Stoker says. "We will probably continue to do both analog and a digital file for as long as we can physically store them and the stock is still available, but certainly, being able to store your audio on a server somewhere would be great."

"We realize the world is looking at us," Brylawski says, "and we don't want to lead people into something prematurely. We're already sort of out there by saying, 'Digital preservation is the future,' because people resisted that forever. But I'm firmly convinced that with a proper management system that migrates the data and checks on it, this is it. That's as far as we're going right now, in terms of endorsing a specific format."