Friday, May 20, 2005

Girl Scouts and the new sound of silence

As if it wasn't hard to enough to get kids hooked on making music, the performing rights organization ASCAP goes after the Girl Scouts and orders them to start collecting fees or face penalties and jail times. Check out this article.

UPDATE: As my friend Mona points out, this article is from 1996. She said they settled for a $1.00 per camp or something like that. But still...

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

It's official!

I can finally announce that I'll be spending the summer working for the Library of Congress as a Junior Fellow Summer Intern in the Division of Recorded Sound doing cataloging. And I have a place to live too!

Monday, May 09, 2005

Can you hear what I hear...what did you say?

I just found this article. I don't own an IPod, although I have been very tempted lately to buy one. Given the state of radio, and which city I move to, it would be very tempting. But I always thought it was kinda crazy to drown out noise with more noise (even music)--you can't just pile more and more on without some kind of damage to your ears. I need to be careful because of all those summers up at Interlochen ushering for those loud rock and country acts. One case pushed 105 decibels!!!

Plus, whenever I see large groups of people with them on, I can't help think of the musical "Company" (Stephen Sondheim) and the alienating effect of trying to separate yourself from your environs. It is indeed, a city of strangers.

Anywho, the article...

From an article in "Scotland on Sunday":
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/entertainment.cfm?id=495772005

For all you IPod lovers!

Digital music craze stores up ear trouble for iPod fanatics

Sun 8 May 2005

"Audiologists believe tens of thousands of young people are causing serious damage to themselves, and are likely to suffer tinnitus and loss of hearing in later life. The experts say MP3 players should be designed to prevent people playing music above 90 decibels, about two-thirds of the maximum volume of a typical device."

Saturday, May 07, 2005

Evaluating the intern

So, I guess I'll keep blogging about audio here.

I got my evaluation from Mike the other day. It was as I thought: that I had put a lot of effort and enthusiasm into it, and that I had learned a lot. Which I did. The area that I felt I needed the most work on--he felt the same. I think being an audiovisual archivist is not just one job, but a hodegpodge of careers: audio engineer, librarian, archivist, preservaion, cataloger, etc. But I do hope to get some more audio production and recording classes under my belt in the next few years. The older formats will be tougher to get to though, until I get an audio archive of my own.

Overall, I felt really good with my experience at the ATM. Mike's a great guy, and I feel that he has a great grasp on the issues surrounding audio archives--and the fact that he can train, a newbie like me, is testament to that (as well as being very patient) :-)

I can't believe that I'm not going to be spending at least part of a week there any more. Before this semester, I worked upstairs in the ATM library (since September 2003) with Suzanne doing cataloging and other library work. I was really lucky to have that gig; and likewise, she was a great teacher. It was really neat to go through the audio training with her. I'll miss my fellow workers downstairs too-Ed, Mike, Ronda, and Gillian. And Daniel, and Marilyn, and Illze, and Patty, and Michelle, and Megan. It was great to work with a group of people that get along so well--a very rare thing!

Friday, May 06, 2005

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.