It's the end of the semester as I know it

It's the light at the end of the tunnel, almost.

After I turn in my last paper tomorrow, "The Arts, Management, and Their Place in the Not-For-Profit Literature: A Bibliography of Monographs, Government and Association Publications, and Web Documents for the Interdisciplinary Field of Arts Management and Administration," [232 *&%^#! pages!!!] I can start planning my video preservation course (see blog: "A Study in Preserving Moving Images."

One last talk I'm going to tomorrow at the Digital Library Program, "Digital Audio Preservation at IU" with Mike and Jon Dunn. The talk is about Sound Directions and the Music Library's joint program with John Hopkins in digitally preserving student recital recordings.

Here was the announcement about the program. If anyone's not busy, you should come and get the most for the dollar you spend here at IU.

You are cordially invited to the last presentation of the semester in the Digital Library Brown Bag series on Friday, May 6 from 12:00 to 1:30 p.m., in Main Library E174 (Media Showing Room). The topic will be "Digital Audio Preservation at IU," presented by Mike Casey, Coordinator of Recording Services in the Archives of Traditional Music, and Jon Dunn, Associate Director for Technology in the Digital Library Program. An abstract of their presentation appears below. I hope you will join us!

Digital Audio Preservation at IU

Sound archives have reached a critical point in their history marked by the simultaneous rapid deterioration of unique original materials, the development of expensive and powerful new digital technologies, and the consequent decline of analog formats and media. It is now clear to most sound archivists and archival organizations that old analog-based preservation methods are no longer viable and, for a variety of technical and economic reasons, that new strategies must be developed in the digital domain.

This talk will discuss issues in digital audio preservation by focusing on two recently-funded grant projects at Indiana University in this area: The Sound Directions project, a partnership between the IU Archives of Traditional Music, IU Digital Library Program, and Harvard University, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, seeks to develop best practices for audio digitization, technical metadata creation, and the creation of preservation packages for long-term storage of audio in digital repositories. The Digital Audio Archives Project (DAAP) is a partnership between IU and Johns Hopkins University with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, to create efficient workflows for high-quality digital capture of analog tapes, using the IU School of Music performance archive as a content source.