I missed this announcement towards the end of last year. Not sure yet of the significance for Spoken Word but an interesting step, especially the news that Tony will ‘develop common standards and policies which can be used across all BBC archive activities’.

‘The BBC’s Director of Archive Content Roly Keating has made his first appointment, with former BBC Controller, Internet Tony Ageh joining his team as Controller of Archive Development.

The BBC’s Archive Content team has been set up to maximise on-demand access to the world’s largest audiovisual archive on public service and commercial platforms and through external partners.

Working with Roly and colleagues across the whole of the BBC, Tony will play a key role in developing the BBC’s archive strategy, with specific responsibility for developing ways of making the archive easily understandable and accessible to users………’

Full Press Release from the BBC

The Sound Directions project at Harvard University and Indiana University announces the publication of Sound Directions: Best Practices for Audio Preservation available to download as PDF from their web site. This 168-page publication presents the results of two years of research and development funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities in the United States. This work was carried out by project and permanent staff at both institutions in consultation with an advisory board of experts in audio engineering, audio preservation, and digital libraries.

Sound Directions: Best Practices for Audio Preservation establishes best practices in many areas where they did not previously exist. This work also explores the testing and use of existing and emerging standards. It includes chapters on personnel and equipment for preservation transfer, digital files, metadata, storage, preservation packages and interchange, and audio preservation systems and workflows. Each chapter is divided into two major parts: a preservation overview that summarizes key concepts for collection managers and curators, followed by a section that presents recommended technical practices for audio engineers, digital librarians, and other technical staff. This latter section includes a detailed look at the inner workings of the audio preservation systems at both Harvard and Indiana.

This first phase of the Sound Directions project produced four key results: the publication of findings and best practices, the development of much needed software tools for audio preservation, the creation or further development of audio preservation systems at each institution, and the preservation of a large number of critically endangered and highly valuable recordings. All of these are detailed in this publication, which provides solid grounding for institutions pursuing audio preservation either in-house or in collaboration with an outside vendor.

For further information on the Sound Directions project: soundir@indiana.edu

An interesting article in the Los Angeles Times about the fragile state of an important (analogue) historical radio archive. The carefully preserved original scripts, fragile transcriptions of radio shows and news broadcasts, antique microphones and rare equipment from Southern California’s first stations have been accidentally contaminated by toxic PCBs.

The dangers may be different but the challenges involved in digital preservation are similarly about trying to predict the unexpected, calculate risk and always having a contingency plan.

The British Library is working with Microsoft and imaging company Content Conversion Specialists (CCS) on a massive book digitisation project.

Over a period of two years, around 100,000 books from the British Library’s nineteenth century literature collection will be made available on its online catalogue and Microsoft’s Live Search Books.

Approximately 30 terabytes of storage will be required to accommodate the project’s output.

The first 25 million pages are expected to take two years to complete. Texts which are hard to get hold of will particularly benefit from the digitisation. For example, authors who were only ever published outside the great centres of literary life have tended not to remain in print and have often been forgotten.

Now, these authors will have a second chance to reach a readership.

“By digitising the whole collection, we give access to the books without the filter of later judgments, whether based on taste or on the economics of printing and publishing,” Dr Jensen said.

Read the full article here.

The BBC Archive Trial (also sometimes called the Open Archive Project) has recently launched. The BBC will put approximately 1000 hours of selected content online as part of the full trial.

The first stage of the trial provides access to a wide range of programmes about the anniversary of independence for India and Pakistan. Many of these programmes will be of interest to our collaborators at Columbia University.

The site also contains some very interesting talking head video interviews:-

- Contributor rights - Simon Hayward-Tapp outlines why re-showing programmes is so complex.
- Why we’ve included difficult programmes - Natalie Christian explains why we have included programmes in the trial that are challenging to watch.
- The BBC television archive - Adam Lee talks about the the BBC’s changing attitude towards programme preservation.
- The BBC sound archive - Hear the “reel” story of radio with Simon Rooks

I suggest that we all at Spoken Word sign up for the trial so we are kept informed of new programmes as they go online.

The UK Digital Preservation Programme, is a JISC funded project led by the National Archives that pools the expertise of several organisations to prevent a potential “digital dark age”, which would result if billions of documents in old formats were to become unreadable by future technology.

Microsoft is one such partner that has joined forces with the UK’s National Archives to help ensure the preservation of the UK’s digital records. As the UK government’s official archive, the National Archives contains 900 years of the nation’s history. Traditionally, these records were produced and stored on paper and physical preservation was relatively straightforward.

But the exponential growth of digital information has created new preservation challenges in that applications supporting older file formats are no longer commercially available in some instances.

The growing problem of accessing old digital file formats is a “ticking time bomb”, the chief executive of the UK National Archives has warned.

Natalie Ceeney said society faced the possibility of “losing years of critical knowledge” because modern PCs could not always open old file formats.

She was speaking at the launch of a partnership with Microsoft to ensure the Archives could read old formats.

The project will enable staff and visitors at the National Archives to view historical information based on legacy formats in the way the author intended. In addition, the National Archives will be able to improve the accessibility of these documents by converting the information to new open file formats.

“Microsoft took the step to implement XML-based file formats that unlock data in documents, allowing them to be archived, restructured, aggregated and reused in new and dynamic ways,” explained Gordon Frazer, UK managing director and vice president of Microsoft International.

Read the full article here.

The Scottish Executive has just announced that it will help to fund a new Scottish Gaelic Digital TV station. It is estimated that the channel currently being developed by the Gaelic Media Service (GMS) will cost between £16m and £17m. GMS is working in partnership with the BBC to develop the Gaelic digital channel.

GMS will use the funding to commission a range of programmes to be broadcast when the new channel is launched later this year.

It will also receive an additional £100,000 to purchase the Scottish Media Group (SMG) Gaelic archive which it has built up over a number of years. Patricia Ferguson, the Culture Minister said: “This funding demonstrates that we are serious about promoting the use of Gaelic in Scotland.”

“It also recognises our commitment to Gaelic broadcasting and reflects the importance of the language to our history and culture. “Gaelic digital television should have a significant impact on the status and use of language, boosting the confidence of Gaelic native speakers and learners.”

“It will also build artistic and technical skills and extend economic opportunities.”

The minister said GMS and the BBC had made “significant progress” towards delivery of a dedicated Gaelic television service which would complement existing radio and online services already provided by the BBC.

From BBC News

More information on Gaelic Media Services can be found at their website.

On 5^th March 2007 the Spoken Word’s Principal Investigator David Donald will travel to Brussels where he will attend a high level workshop based around the agenda of driving forward the establishment of a European e-Infrastructure for e-Science digital repositories along with other ‘professionals’ in the area of digital repositories.

The conference will revolve around various discussions of the following issues:

• What the major issues are behind the interoperability and widening of access to digital repositories across Europe.
• What are the tools that need to be encouraged in order to move infrastructures, techniques for metadata assignment, and storage management technologies forward?
• What are the key technological limitations inhibiting the growth of repositories?
• How can we reduce the domain-specific knowledge required to access and use these repositories in order to open them up to wider research?
• How can a sustainable technical framework be realised, preserved and maintained across Europe that will ensure continuing accessibility to repositories?
• How can European-level policy initiatives encourage growth and the overcoming of technological barriers?

The findings from the workshop discussions will be used in various EU-funded initiatives concerning repositories.

The BBC trust has given initial approval to the BBC to proceed with it’s plans for an ‘on demand’ service that allows viewers to watch programmes online or download and keep them on their computer for up to thirty days after they were first broadcast. This story can be found on the BBC website by clicking here.

The Guardian have published a very good article looking at the issues surrounding today’s copyright announcement that declares copyright for recorded music shall remain at 50 years.

This article is interesting as it looks at how the British Library would like the law to favour the archivst and their institution because a large number of recordings they have are crumbling before their eyes. They have ideas for a digital future whereby such recording can be digitised and made public before they get in such a condition whereby they are lost forever.

Karen Coyle, a California expert on digital libraries, “you can’t wait until it starts to deteriorate. You have to begin to preserve it immediately. None of the laws account for that.”

Read the full article here.