Guidelines on the Production and Preservation of Digital Audio Objects

IASA Technical Committee. Guidelines on the Production and Preservation of Digital Audio Objects. IASA-TC-04. Aarhus, Denmark: International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives, 2004.

The newest publication by the IASA's Technical Committee is the Guidelines on the Production and Preservation of Digital Audio Objects. This dense document moves beyond its 2003 publication, The Safeguarding of the Audio Heritage: Ethics, Principles, and Preservation Strategy, towards the application of these principles in the reproduction of the original sound media, the creation of digital sound objects. It also elucidates strategies for managing long-term preservation and access of these materials. There is discussion of digital mass-storage systems, data file formats, media, and the hardware systems which will be essential for the operation of new digital archives.

Its three main areas include: 1) standards, principles, and metadata; 2) signal extraction from originals; and 3) target formats. The first section talks about having a well-planned strategy for preserving digital objects and supporting these objects with robust metadata. The second section maintains that our goal as audio archivists should be to provide as good or better fidelity in the digital object than what came from the original analog item. Every kind of analog carrier is documented here, with their particular characteristics and transfer challenges. The third section focuses on where these objects will be stored, whether on optical formats or on digital mass storage systems. The document details the benefits, costs, and disadvantages of operating in each environment. While IASA TC-04 often provides solutions that are of immediate implementation only to large-scale universities and corporations, there is valuable guidance for the smaller archive who must use intermediate solutions until digital mass storage systems are cost-effective for everybody.