Internal services are fundamental and traditionally have three facets: providing information about and from the collection; providing research room listening facilities; providing for the duplication of recordings.
Information about the holdings must be available on the premises for individual users. The information may take various forms. An information sheet, brochure or pamphlet should be provided to explain the services available. General information should be given on research hours, regulations on research room use, an outline of holdings, specific copyright restrictions, a statement of duplication policy, instructions for ordering copies and on the use of playback equipment and finding aids. The principle finding aids such as shelf lists, inventories and card indexes which normally provide administrative control of holdings, should be made available to all researchers. This is especially true for basic documentation such as shelf lists that are often prepared. These primitive but essential finding aids often become a primary reference tool for researchers since full content cataloguing of sound recordings' in archives is rarely completely achieved. As a general rule all finding aids should be open to all researchers irrespective of restrictions on access that may apply to the recordings they refer to.
A substantial part of a basic reference service lies in answering inquiries received by telephone or mail. This is a necessary service that must be provided but may be limited by lack of staff or other resources. Normally the sound archive staff should be able to provide information about recordings (i.e. does the archive have a recording on a certain subject or event or of a particular person, song or title?) but may draw the line and limit the service when asked to provide information from the recordings (i.e. listening to selections or parts of recordings so as to identify speakers or composers or to furnish detailed discographical information).
In addition to the administrative finding aids generated by a sound archive, there may be other descriptive materials that will be of great use to researchers in recorded sound such as scripts, production files, personal papers, musical scores, recording company ledgers, registers and corporate files. This type of information is often essential for a researcher and as archivally important as the recordings themselves. A sound archive should therefore strive at the time of acquisition not only to obtain the actual sound recordings but also any textual material that relates to or forms an integral part in the creation of the recordings.
If a sound archive can accomplish nothing else, it must provide access to its holdings for individual researchers through some type of listening facility. Normally this will involve establishing a research room or area dedicated to user access and consultation. The research room usually is a supervised area where archive visitors are registered, use finding aids, consult with sound archive staff about holdings and listen to copies of recordings at carrels or tables equipped with playback equipment and headphones. It is often helpful to have listening room procedures and policies spelled out on a standard form to be read and signed by visitors. Written procedures and guidelines for the research room are also valuable in providing guidance and on-the-job training for the sound archive staff. This saves their time and speeds their response to inquiries. It may also be necessary to require listening appointments in advance and to limit the quantity of recordings requested in a single day by anyone researcher. The guideline here should be to provide a reference service on a daily basis limited only by the number of playback units or by the trained staff available to handle the requests. A balance between providing staff time for other archival functions, such as cataloguing, description and arrangement, should be strived for but reference service should have the highest priority, second only to the preservation of the collection.
It is important to recognize that setting up a listening facility will necessitate that the sound archive establishes an access policy that coincides with and will not compromise its preservation policies. Ideally, therefore, original sound recordings must not be handled or played by or for researchers. Proper preservation of archival sound recordings must take precedence over the needs of research. This policy may in some instances delay immediate user access to recordings but playing an original recording, such as a fragile unique disc, for one individual could destroy or damage the item forever.1
Several procedures are available and in use at various sound archives which will allow free access to researchers for listening purposes but still provide for the preservation of the original archival recordings. For most sound archives~ this requires that a listening or study copy of original recordings be prepared. Ideally the listening copy should be generated at the same time as the original recording is duplicated and a preservation tape is made. (Some sound archives now prepare the listening copy on inexpensive audio cassettes which are convenient for researcher use and take up little storage space.) Where listening copies do not exist then gradually, over a period of time and based upon preservation needs and researcher requests, a collection of original recordings can be duplicated both for preservation and research use.
For other sound archives, a less than ideal compromise is reached by original recordings being played for the researcher by sound archives staff. This is accomplished by having listening points separate from playback equipment. Researchers request recordings and listen through earphones while playback is controlled in another area by archive staff.
The ideal reference situation and the recommended procedure is to allow the user to listen to a tape copy of original recordings and control the tape playback equipment. In this way, researchers in using the equipment itself or by using remote control capabilities available on virtually all semi-professional and professional tape decks, can determine exactly which segment of the recording they wish to hear. The researcher can stop, reverse, repeat, and in general is able to work through recordings. There are many obvious advantages for a sound archive to adopt this method of providing access. Not only does it benefit the user and save archive staff time, but it preserves the original which is not subjected to repeated playings and possible abuse through handling by researchers or staff. Providing listening copies also prevents theft and allows for maximum security of the archival recordings, which should be stored in a different location from the listening facility.
Regarding the type of listening and playback equipment to be used, the basic guideline is that the research equipment be durable, reliable and able to reproduce recordings faithfully. Compromises on the quality of playback equipment used in a listening facility may be necessary. However, a sound archive should not concentrate all of its financial resources and technical staff on recording or copying original material on professional equipment and producing high-quality listening copies, then to discover it can only provide its researchers with inferior grade, poorly maintained playback equipment and headphones.
Such poor planning and disregard for the archive users actually does a disservice to the recordings being preserved which cannot then be heard as they were meant to be.
Every sound archive needs a policy and procedure for making copies of archival sound recordings for researchers. This is a fundamental service that must be provided. It is made necessary by the fact that the greatest obstacle · for the user to research in recorded sound lies in obtaining copies of required recordings. Duplication policy will, of course, depend on the nature of the collection, its preservation status, restrictions by donors on certain recordings and the copyright limitations on use that may exist within a particular country. However, within these limitations which are faced by all sound archives, a policy statement is needed outlining what will or will not be copied and backed up by procedures for making copies available once permissions are secured by the researcher.
There are several ways to provide copies of recordings when requested. Most often a duplication service, either in-house or by contract with an outside source, can be established to make tape duplicates for purchase either in a reel-to-reel or cassette format at prices to be established by the sound archive. An adequate and equitable price schedule can be formulated by charging the researcher for the cost of the tape stock, reel and box plus an additional charge for the recording engineer's time to produce the duplicate copy. Mailing, shipping, and handling charges must also be accounted for in the final costs to the researcher.
A duplication service normally requires that original recordings (whether disc, tape, wire, cylinder, etc.) be recorded, so that an additional copy is available from which duplicates can be made for researchers. The guiding principle to be followed is that just as original recordings or archival copies should not be played for or by researchers, they also must not be played repeatedly to produce duplicates. On heavily used or requested items (say more than five times) it may be advisable to prepare more than one copy for use in making duplicates for archive users.
In lieu of producing copies of recordings for purchase some sound archives, for example the Sound Section of the Public Archives of Canada, allow researchers to provide the blank tape which is used by the archive to make the requester's copy. In addition to providing a duplication service, the Motion Picture, Sound and Video Branch at the US National Archives in Washington DC, allows researchers to record their own copies of non-restricted recordings directly from listening copies played on its research room equipment. The visitor need only provide his own tape and recording equipment. Staff technical time and archive recording equipment can thus be used more effectively while the researcher is able inexpensively to obtain copies of recordings for study and research. These are examples of duplication procedures which aim to provide the maximum access and use of archival sound recordings at the minimum cost and inconvenience to the user.
When duplication is permissible and offered as a basic reference service then, on the basis of staff and equipment resources, a sound archive must determine whether to produce copies of segments or excerpts of recordings as needed by researchers or only to provide copies of entire reels. For some sound archives, because of the high volume of requests for duplication, it has been found to be impractical to provide copies of excerpts of recordings and a policy has been established to allow researchers to select for purchase only full reels. For extensively used collections with heavy research traffic, full-reel copying allows the archive to utilize high speed duplicating equipment thus effectively lowering the cost of tape duplicates since excessive time and labor is not required by archive technical staff to locate and record numerous segments or excerpts. A requested item is simply placed on high speed duplicators and the entire reel is quickly and cheaply reproduced. This method of duplication has been found to speed response time to researchers' orders and to be less expensive overall for the user.