audio preservation

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has published "the first comprehensive, national-level study of the state of sound recording preservation ever conducted in the U.S.". Commissioned for and sponsored by the National Recording Preservation Board, Library of Congress, the 169-page report, titled The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States: A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age, may be ordered or dowloaded here: http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub148abst.html

We're all producing audiovisual files, but has anyone ever seen one? Where do they live? Can you point to one? Will you flip a switch or click on an icon and find nothing but a puff of smoke, or an error message? Do you know about the encoding and metadata inside the file, and the wrapper around it all? Do you know how to deal with 'compression' (data reduction) - when to avoid it, how to live with it, how to escape it, and what the roadmap is for your own audiovisual files?

Our "Guidelines on the Production and Preservation of Digital Audio Objects" (IASA-TC 04), prepared by the IASA Technical Committee, is a highly acclaimed authority on digital audio preservation used by sound archivists worldwide.

The full text and illustrations are now available online: http://www.iasa-web.org/tc04/audio-preservation