January 27 ·29, 1995
National Film Theatre, South bank, London
TECHNOLOGY AND OUR CULTURAL HERITAGE
Technology's Role in Preserving and Accessing the Memory of the World
The Fourth Joint Technical Symposium discussing the technical problems facing technicians, archivists and librarians responsible for collections of sounds, moving images and still images stored on film, magnetic tape, records and CDs
is to be held, by permission of the British Film Institute, at the National Film Theatre which is part of the South Bank Arts Complex by the River Thames in
Central London.
The speakers will be presenting the latest research into the chemistry of the breakdown of polymers, methods of restoration of sound and moving image
signals and carriers and the ethical consideration of preservation. Papers examining the new storage technologies being considered or introduced in a
number of collections will be given. A session to discuss specific problems raised by delegates to the Symposium and a programme of public vlewings of
films and videos of technical interest are also being arranged.
Fee: Full Registration £175.00 for members of FIAF, FIAT, IASA, ICA and IFLA (£225.00 for non-members)
Rates for Accompanying Persons and One Day registration will also be available.
Further details and information is available from the TCC Secretariat, 14, Dulverton Drive, Furzton, Milton Keynes MK4 1 DE, United Kingdom.
Tel: +44 (908) 502610 FAX: +44 (908) 502520 E-Mail: [email protected]
IASA Journal, no. 3, May 1994 67
THE IMPLICATIONS OF "NEW TECHNOLOGY" FOR SOUND ARCHIVES
George Boston, Milton Keynes, England
I was recently asked to write an article about the implications of "New Technology"
for text libraries. This caused me to ponder about the effect of new technology on the audio-visual world. IASA has been debating its role within the audio-visual world for several years but the part that technology will play in the futureof sound archiving has not been widely discussed. Over the past few years, the debate about technology has been about the merits of digital audio and, in particular, which format should be used.
In fact, this debate is looking less and less meaningful because the technologies based upon a carrier stored on shelves in some form of traditional archive are being superseded, even before they have become widely used.
Dietrich Schiiller, Chairman of the IASA Technical Committee, and his colleagues have stated on a number of occasions that the carriers currently used to store sound are decaying irretrievably. Some carriers may last for millenia; others are unusable after a decade. The results of the research by people such as Prof. Norman Allen and his colleagues at Manchester Metropolitan University and the practical examples found in a number of hot, humid countnes underline the truth of this statement. By making great efforts we can slow the disintegration but we cannot stop the process. On the other hand we can easily accelerate the decay by bad handling and storage practice.
To preserve the sounds, we must, therefore, accept the necessity of copying the sounds from the existing carriers to new ones.
The realisation of the inevitability of decay also answers one of the points frequently made about the copying of a collection. That is we cannot afford the cash or the manpower to set up a programme to copy the collection to a new format. Archives can no longer avoid discussing how to achieve the copying of their collection. If the process of copying is not started soon, it will not be possible to achieve an orderly migration to a new carrier.
The big question is "What new carrier?". We could just transfer from old discs to new, analogue, 1/4 inch tapes and carry on running the archives as we do at present.
We could move into the future a little and use a digital tape or disc format and, again, operate much as at present. A digital format does offer the possibility of automated copying of carriers In any future migration. An analogue recording requires trained ears to assess the quality of the copy. These are expensive. A digital recording can be checked by a machine. I do not think, however, these courses of action are wise in the long term.
The 1990 Joint Technical Symposium in Ottawa marked, in hindsight, a major shift in thinking about sound archives. It was here, for examl?le, that Dietrich Schiiller first expounded his view that the information on sound carners is more important than the carrier itself. This, if accepted, radically changes the concept of preservation.
IASA Journal, no. 3, May 1994 68
Bill Storm and David Wickstrom Df the Belfer Audio Laboratories at Svracuse University presented papers about their vision of the future. Their basic idea of using computer controlled storage to feed sounds, images and texts to a standard PC or Macmtosh computer seemed, at the time. far fetched. The BeIfer Labs team were challenged to prove their vision. They began a serious investigation into what could be achieved wIth existing software and hardware. Within a year, this work resulted in the TIMS (Total Information Management System) demonstrations of 1991 and 1992 that a number of us were able to see before the BeIfer Laboratories were closed down by Syracuse University. Since then, "Multimedia" has become the favourite word of computer marketing men. None of the commercial systems available from the big computer manufacturers have, however, approached the size of store that would be reqUIred by even a small sound archive. The hard magnetic discs just did not have the capacity and the price per minute of audio is prohibitively high.
The big breakthrough was the realisation that "Computer Storage" does not have to mean a hard disc or a memory chip. It can be any form of storage that can be controlled by and accessed from a computer terminal. The latest news is from Stidwestfunk in Baden-Baden who, as reported by Albrecht Rafner elsewhere in this issue of the lA SA Journal, are investigating the installation of an automated tape library.
The significance of this is that the sounds will be selected remotely from a number of computer terminals or workstations in the studios and editing areas of the station. The automated store will select the tape containing the required sounds and play the material into the workstations local memo'ry. Once the chosen material has been played, the tape is replaced in its storage slot, and the tape and the playback machine are available to another user. The user can then search backwards and forwards through the material at will without any fear of damaging the original. Unlike present day archives where each user ties up the recording, a playback machine and, in many cases, a member of the staff, the automated library can serve many users simultaneously.
This will be within the Stidwestfunk premises. Any sound archive can install a similar system. The principles of remote access do not, however, have to stop at the walls of the archive. With suitable interfaces, they can be used to provide access to users outside the station via the public data and telephone networks. This opens the doors of the archives to many more users. There will be problems to solve, not least those of security and charging.
For a large archive, even the size of store being considered by Stidwestfunk is too small. One answer to this is to link several systems in parallel to provide the required storage. To transfer the collection to a new system will take time and to buy storage as you require it is a sensible way of spreading the costs over a number of years.
Another solution will be storage media that hold even more information' than the 50 GByte cassettes used in the system being considered by Stidwestfunk. These higher capacity carriers are being developed now. The operation of a storage facility using these will be as described above.
IASA Journal, no. 3, May 1994 69
Where these developments will start to impinge on the current debate about the future of IASA is the ability of this type of storage to hold images as well as sounds. To the machines it is computer data. It is the workstations that decide whether it is to be decoded as sounds or images or, even, bank account details. If a sound archive stores the images of an opera In the same storage facility as the sound, uses the same playback machines for sounds and images and the same workstations to view and hear the results, can IASA say that it is only interested in sound? The media are converging and the instrument of convergence is the computer.
Other areas of the work of IASA that these new storage systems will have a major impact on are those of copyright and cataloguing. Does the temporary downloading to a workstation of a recording held in a computerise storage system constitute a copy?
Does it make a difference whether the downloading takes place to a terminal within the archives premises or, via communications cirCUIts, to a terminal elsewhere? Are the cataloguing rules the same? What changes will be required in documentation?
These new storage systems also open up questions such as "How many copies of Mozart's Horn Concertos played by Dennis Brain and the Philharmonia Orchestra under Karajan does the world need?". We are concerned about the steady increase in the holdings of archives and the pressure that this places upon the available storage space. Much of this space is taken up with recordings that are duplicated many times over around the world. Can we rationalise the position a little?
I am not able to answer these questions but the appropriate committees within IASA can. They must start to consider them now before the first system is installed. The debate cannot be allowed to continue too long or lA SA itself will be bypassed. I do not think that the IASA membership is backward looking. It is, in fact, looking to the future to preserve the past. "Forward to the Past" - there's a good movie title there somewhere!
IASA Journal, no. 3, May 1994 70