Workshop on the curation and preservation of audiovisual collections

TAPE workshop on the curation and preservation of audiovisual collections

University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK, Monday 12th – Friday 16th May 2008

This five-day workshop will provide an intensive grounding in the theory and practice of audiovisual archiving, enabling curators to develop strategies to safeguard their collections. The training will be led by a range of expert film, video and audio curators from across Europe. They will address issues such as the handling and storage of analogue originals, digitisation and restoration, managing digital assets and enabling access and reuse …

Full details are available from the University of Glasgow website.

Dutch get out the big guns for audio-visual digitisation

Summer of 2007 saw the start of a mass Dutch digitisation project Images of the Future

The largest Dutch digitization of audio-visual content project ‘Images for the Futures’ has started in July 2007. Over 137.000 hours of video, 22.510 hours of film, 123.900 hours of audio and 2.9 million photos will be digitized in the next seven years. Most content is copyright protected, but parts of the collection are being offered under open licenses.

Most of the documentary material on the capture process is still to be translated from Dutch, but it will provide interesting reading on developing an infrastructure capable of handling so much content

Integrating tools for audio resources

Everyone knows the audio resources are enlightening, educational and entertaining, but it can be difficult to know how to integrate content such as that provided by the British Library’s Archival Sound Recordings.

The EASAIER Project: Enabling Access to Sound Archives through Integration, Enrichment and Retrieval is building tools that solve these problems. Project member Ceila Duffy spoke of the need to create tools that allows audio on the web to go beyond playback.

Some of the tools created by the project include web clients that allow audio files to be speed up or slowed down (useful for music practice), to locate emotions or accents without spoken word files (useful for resource discovery), to separate out different speakers or instruments or sounds, to represent music in visual form, or to do searching based not on keyword but on actual audio content.

This is all fantastic stuff and makes audio material so much more attractive. The next challenge will be to embed such tools into web interfaces that give end-users easy ways to tag, analyse and manipulate the content of audio archives.

Unlocking Audio: Sharing Experience of Mass Digitisation

The British Library is hosting a conference on a topic which there is increasing digitisation interest, such as the BL’s own Archival Sound Recordings project.

According to the project blurb:

“Unlocking Audio is an international conference exploring the planning and strategies required for the successful execution of large-scale audio digitisation projects, and the technical and practical issues involved.”

There is more info on the conference from this weblink