Information Bulletin no. 21, April 1997

IASA Increases Membership

A warm welcome to the following institutions who have recently joined IASA:

- Russian State Archives for Sound Recordings
107005 Russia, Moscow, 2nd Baumanskaja 3
Director: Vladimir A. Koljada, fax 007095 267 1389
The collection contains all kinds of sound recordings amounting to 4.5 million items in total.

- Latvian State Archives of Film, Photo and Phono Documents
Skunu Str. 11, LV-1047, Riga, Latvia
Director: Inta Kanepaja, fax 529954
The collection contains 5000 sound recordings, 62000 films and 250000 photographs

- Biblioteca de Catalunya. Fonoteca
Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 657 bis, 08010, Barcelona, Spain
Director: Margarida Estanyol, fax 343 265 66 35
The Fonoteca is responsible for the preservation of Catalan sound recordings acquired by legal deposit.

We also welcome a new individual member Mary Ellen Kitchens from the Schallarchiv, Bayerischer Rundfunk and new a associate member Dr. Steve Johnson, Independent Media Appraiser, Bloomington IL, U.S.

Philip L. Miller

Members will be saddened to learn of the death in November last year of Philip Lieson Miller from New York. He was Chief of the Music Division at the New York Public Library at the time when the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound were planned, designed and built at the Lincoln Center in 1965 and was a prime mover in getting the Archives established. A keen collector and regular reviewer of sound recordings, Philip was one of the founders of ARSC and became its first President in 1967. He also enjoyed a long association with IASA.

Changes in Radio NZ

Bruce Russell has taken over from Stephen Riley as Chief Archivist at Radio New Zealand Sound. For more information contact soundnz@mail.tpnet.co.nz

IASA Website

The IASA "homepage" was launched in early February, address:

http://www.llgc.org.uk/iasa/

The IASA Editor will not be commissioning web-site material from anyone so it's up to you if you want to see changes or additions made. Many thanks to those institutions who have provided their URLs to Iestyn Hughes at the National Library of Wales.

There was some discussion of the text at the mid-year IASA Board meeting and it is likely that changes will soon be made in line with the new publicity material which Martin Elste and Magdalene Cséve are working on.

Members have also enquired about adding sound to the site and information about institutions which do not yet have a presence on the Internet. Iestyn says both enrichments are feasible. The best way for dealing with the latter is to create a short homepage for the various institutions based on information which the institutions must undertake to provide.

Sound files can be associated with any one of those institutions listed as well as to existing linked sites. An alternative for the sounds idea is to create an "interesting sounds" page. Iestyn's organisation is prepared to load the sound files, depending on demand.

To create "whole pages" he will require:

- a disc containing the text (in English, or English and another language) in a Microsoft word processor format - or as ASCII text;
- photographs which can be scanned or as digital files in GIF or JPEG format;
- a logo, bromide quality or digital version in GIF or JPEG format;
- sound clips (not more than thirty seconds duration) either as a very clearly labelled DAT tape, or as a disc file in 16bit .WAV format (8bit is acceptable, but not 32bit).
- moving images either as .MOV files or PAL standard on analogue tape - either Betacam SP, or SVHS / VHS which can be transferred to .MOV files.

To include "interesting sounds/images", rather than whole pages, the same formats apply.

- sound files in .WAV 16 or 8bit
- moving image in .MOV files (or MPEG 1 if the other is not available)
- photographs and logos in .GIF or .JPEG

If people cannot create these files themselves then send DAT/Betacam SP/SVHS/VHS (to PAL standard). Stills and logos can be sent as high quality hard copy.

It goes without saying that ALL RIGHTS MUST BE CLEARED on any audio or visual items submitted and evidence of clearances supplied to Iestyn.

The IASA Web-Master's address is: R Iestyn Hughes, Assistant Keeper National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, SY23 3BU, U.K. e-mail: iestyn.hughes@llgc.org.uk.

IASA is very grateful to the National Library of Wales for agreeing to host and maintain its web-site.

Meanwhile, on tinfoil...

There is now a tinfoil site at http://www.tinfoil.com including informative, entertaining and well-illustrated sections on early recorded sounds and wax cylinders an "Edison 150th Anniversary Commemorative"(which includes the inventor reminiscing about his favourite invention, the phonograph) and a Cylinder of the Month.

Each month a different wax cylinder recording is featured. The cylinder is digitally recorded directly from the original and the entire recording is available for downloading. March "cylinder of the month" was from 1899, an early concert cylinder recording: The Grand March From Tannhauser played by the Edison Grand Concert Band.

Site owner Glenn Sage (glenn@tinfoil.com) welcomes comments, questions, corrections, and suggestions. Needless to say, there is a well-developed list of related sites and topics, including other vintage recording sites in America and the Edison National Historic Site page at http://www.nps.gov/edis/ed500000.htm with its wealth of photographic images of early phonography and Edisonia.

... and in South Africa

The South African Broadcasting Sound Archives' homepage was launched in February. The internet address is: http://www.sabc.co.za/units/soundarc.

Nice cover, shame about the umlauts

You will by now have received your copy of the 1997 IASA Directory. Many thanks for all the feedback, in some cases amounting to a wholesale proof-reading which I am sorry to say was not properly carried out by the authors given their commitment to producing it to the agreed deadline. In view of the large number of errors (which, it has to be said, must also be present in other IASA documentation since the Directory was largely derived from extant sources) and the unhappiness caused by the general omission of diacritics, especially umlauts, Mark and I have agreed to produce a new Directory in 1998 rather than wait another two years.

News out of America

Introducing N I N C H: Networked Cultural Heritage Newsletter:

http://www-ninch.cni.org/news/news.html

This describes itself as a "news and information digest for those working to preserve and provide access to cultural heritage resources through networked digital technology" and is published through the NINCH-Announce listserv of the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage. Free distribution is welcomed with due acknowledgments.

Here is a selection from the most recent issue, No. 6, February 7, 1997:

"Corporate digital archive: Simon and Schuster's new Corporate Digital Archive, reported recently by Business Week, is an indication of how one commercial publisher is realizing the benefits of digitizing older material. Initially, the archive will be used for searching and accessing the publisher's archive of 40,000 images for re-use in its own publications. However, with a goal of generating half of its revenues from electronic publishing by the year 2000, the company plans on direct sales of its images. The new system can add a digital watermark, calculate royalty payments and track the use of an image throughout the Internet. (See Business Week 23 Dec. 96 p80)

Copyright and database legislation: next steps unclear: Currently there is no clear indication of the next steps forward with copyright legislation. The WIPO Treaty has to be ratified by the [U.S.] Senate but whether any substantial implementation legislation will be required is uncertain. Such legislation could provide the opportunity for clarifying domestic positions on the Treaty (and its Agreed Statements), including the extension of fair use and other limitations and liability by service providers for online copyright infringements.

There is currently some jockeying within government agencies and committees as to where the lead and main interest will come from: the Patents and Trademarks Office, the Copyright Office in the Library of Congress, the Commerce Department, the National Economic Council, the White House itself, individual House and Senate members, the Senate Judiciary Committee or the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

It is quite clear however that a form of the deferred WIPO database treaty (last year's domestic HR3531--see http://www-ninch.cni.org/News/Newsletter2.html#New Database Bill) will not only be discussed at other WIPO meetings in the next few months but will be introduced as legislation. There is also the possibility that a version of last year's NII Copyright Protection Act will be re-introduced.

Unicode babble: Unicode is a universal character encoding scheme for displaying non-standard character sets for "just about every letter or glyph for all known languages, alive and dead"--from Ahom and Akkadian Cuneiform to Tircul and Ugaritic Cuneiform. Following discussion about Unicode on the Humanist listserv, John Unsworth spoke of the early version of software being developed at Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technologies in the Humanities called Babble.

Once a UNIX prototype, Babble is now being developed as Java software. Babble will display, search, and manipulate texts which have already been created in Unicode. "Babble will provide linked scrolling, linked searching, multiple text display, and some SGML awareness." John offers pointers to programs one can use to create Unicode texts in the first place and offers to keep anyone interested apprised of Babble developments. Contact him at jmu2m@virginia.edu

Movements: Jennifer Trant, formerly Policies and Standards Manager for Britain's Arts and Humanities Data Service, is now based in Pittsburgh, working as a private consultant specializing in the application of technology to museums, cultural heritage and the arts and as managing editor of Archives & Museum Informatics: a cultural heritage quarterly.

Danish prima voce

The State Media Archive in Aarhus announces the re-release of G&T and HMV originals recorded in 1906-1912 on Vilhelm Herold: Opera arias and songs Nimbus NI 7880. The recordings have been transferred from originals in the collection of the State Media Archive of the State and University Library in Aarhus and published in collaboration with Nimbus Records.

The Danish tenor, Vilhelm Herold (1865-1937), was not only a legend in his own country; he was also much sought-after in other countries. He appeared in quite a few European opera houses where he sang in the original languages. He was welcomed as a guest in Berlin, Budapest, Dresden, Kristiania (Oslo), London, Prague, Stockholm and Stuttgart. When he appeared at Covent Garden in 1907 as Lohengrin, some people thought him the nearest thing to the famous Jean de Reszke that they had heard. The similarity to de Reszke is not strange; in 1903 Herold went to Paris to study with Giovanni Sbriglia to further develop his voice, and the same Sbriglia had also taught the de Reszke brothers.

Herold started to record in 1899 when he was thirty-four. During his career more than 200 recordings were made and that resulted in 135 titles being published. He stopped singing in 1915 but his records sold well into the 1930s. Even as late as 1946, two hundred copies of two duets with Helge Nissen were made for the Danish market and 197 copies were sold.

Today few are familiar with Herold's recordings but this publication in Nimbus's Prima Voce series, where we also find well-known singers such as Caruso, McCormack and Tetrazzini, may attract a new generation of admirers for Vilhelm Herold.

Elsebeth Kirring

Report on Information Engineering 5th Framework Discussion Forum

The meeting took place on 27th and 28th February in Brussels. It was organised by the European Commission DGXIII/E-4, outside the scope of the Libraries Programme, being concerned with electronic publishing (principally CD-Rom and Internet publishing).

There were 57 participants from Europe and the USA with a good mix of private and public sector, consultancy organisations and national institutions.

The purpose of the meeting was to begin the process of formulating EP [European Project] themes under the forthcoming 5th framework research programme. The projects supported by this programme will run from 1999 to 2002. The event was intended as the first milestone in an extended iterative process. The Commission is anxious to tailor its research expenditure to the needs of the real world and will continue to use this group for consultation. It remains to be seen how credible the results of these efforts will prove.

The meeting was structured around general sessions with guest speakers and "breakout sessions" which separated the meeting to brainstorm four themes:

1. Mass market publishing, catalogues and shopping

2. Public information and publishing for the citizen

3. Content generation

4. Digital collections

I was part of the group looking at digital collections. Two ideas that were presented by our group were a personal application using geographic information systems, and a commercial service for content providers providing on-line access to digitised sound and video collections. The full range of results are being written up and I can circulate them later if anyone is interested.

Crispin Jewitt

Draft EBU Standards on Broadcast Interchange File Format

George Boston reports on the Meeting of the European Broadcasting Union Working Group on broadcast interchange file format held in London on December 13th 1996. This is an abridged version of the full report submitted to the IASA Board in January.

"The meeting was called to give archivists the opportunity to comment on the draft proposals for a file format for the transfer of digital audio between sites within an organisation and between organisations. This meeting formed one part of a two-day meeting of the EBU Project Group on Digital Audio Production and Archives.

The proposal is for an extension to the Microsoft WAVE format. A WAVE file consists of several "chunks" of data (a chunk being a set of data within a Resource Interchange File Format - RIFF - file; WAVE files are are particular type of RIFF file). The audio information is one chunk within the file. It is preceded by several mandatory chunks specified by Microsoft that contain information to identify the file as being in WAVE format. The proposal would insert additional chunks of data, some mandatory, some optional, into the basic WAVE format file between the Microsoft and the audio chunks. This additional data would provide information relevant to broadcasters and broadcast archives.

No information about the proposal was supplied before the meeting and most of what was distributed during the meeting, in the form of working documents, is still confidential. It is hoped that a public domain document will be issued in January 1997 [it would appear that more news about this may be forthcoming after the AES Convention taking taking place in Munich at the time of going to press. Ed.]. Only some of the data chunks have been fully defined. There are several obvious additional pieces of data required, e.g. an identifier for the institution to prevent duplication of identification numbers when items are exhanged between institutions, links to full catalogue information, information on copyright and use restrictions.

It was agreed that very long programmes should be broken down into shorter sequences (e.g. movements of symphonic works, acts of plays, etc.) each sequence held in a separate WAVE file linked to the other sequences to make up the whole. Index points, as used on Cds, must also be catered for.

Still to be agreed is the method for handling multi-track items such as Dolby 5+1 cinema sound tracks.

The standard should also fit into an html package. This means that it would be compatible with the proposed Memory Of The World standard.

The EBU will be placing a "Gold Standard" file on the Internet. If a set of digital audio equipment can access and handle the file, it will be able to handle material presented in the Broadcast Exchange Format. This will be followed by "Silver Standard" files from manufacturers. Both file categories were expected to be available for the AES Convention in Munich last month.

In summary, the standard will simplify the transfer of sounds across networks but it will not improve the difficulty facing sound archives, especially broadcast archives, with regard to the receipt of compressed digital sounds. Sounds that have been permanently converted to a lower compression standard in order to fit into a communication chain will be less of a problem than those that have been compressed and de-compressed since these rely heavily on good quality, precisely aligned CODECs for coding and decoding the original signal. In addition, if the compression system used is "lossy" - data reduction as defined by the IASA Technical Committee - it will create more problems for the archive and subsequent users in the long term".

Beleagured BBC Sound Archivists

Sally Hine writes: There has been yet another reorganisation at the BBC - the third in as many years. The forty or so middle managers from the four library groupings (Broadcast Archives, Document Archives, Information Research and Music) have now been restructured into Service Delivery Units.

The new Service Delivery Units are:- Research Services, Intake, Storage and Accommodation, Cataloguing and IT Support. The 550 staff in BBC Information and Archives have all been mapped into one of these delivery units, so for example the Selectors from the Sound Archive have been mapped into Cataloguing with a manager covering all the cataloguing areas in all the libraries and archives, and the Current Library operation has been mapped into Intake with an overall Service Manager. I am now a Research Services Manager in Broadcasting House and am responsible for the "front of house" operations of the Sound Archive and the Music Library at Broadcasting House (gramophone records, popular music song sheets and sheet music as well as books on music.) The philosophy behind this restructuring is that eventually we will be "one service" and that our libraries and archives will all be "one stop shops", with sound, television, printed material and music being available from one central enquiry point.

The other news from the BBC is that, as a result of the sale of transmission to a private company, we have had to move out of our "state-of-the-art" archive store and technical area at Brookmans Park in Hertfordshire. The storage facilities at Brookmans Park were designed for us only 5 years ago and it has been a little distressing to have to move about 500,000 items across London to Brentford in Middlesex, where the Television Archive resides. However, it makes a lot of sense to store the two collections together. We save on the rental of Brookmans Park and the staff (five Archive Technical Assistants) are in a better environment (there are about 120 staff at the Television end). There have been a couple of disagreements - in the Sound Library we file our material from left to right and at the other end they "snake" it (I am reliably informed that the Greek term for this procedure is striphogirisma), but everyone has had to compromise. The move is nearly complete as I write this (March 1997) and we have had a little disruption to our service but not too much.

Digital Leanings

Announcing the First European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, 1-3 September, 1997, Pisa, Italy, http://www.area.pi.cnr.it/ErcimDL/dl3.html.

"This conference is the first of a series of European conferences on research and technology for digital libraries funded by the CEU TMR Programme. In particular its objectives are: to bring together researchers from multiple disciplines whose science relates to the development of digital libraries; to provide an opportunity for these scientists to form a research community in Europe specific to digital library development and to enable them to discuss issues and strategies specific to the European context; to assist young researchers in establishing relationships with senior scientists in their areas of interest; to enable review and discussion of research under way in, Europe, the US, Japan and other countries on digital libraries; to stimulate researchers, especially young scientists, to explore new areas of interest in digital library development; to establish a forum for discussion of issues specific to Europe such as interoperability, multilinguality and intellectual property policy and information commerce; to provide an opportunity for researchers in the relevant enabling technologies and information sciences to discuss issues related to interoperability between world wide distributed digital libraries."

Digital architecture

A brief item from America:

NDLP

"The National Digital Library Program (NDLP) at the Library of Congress is a large scale project to convert historic collections to digital form and make them widely available over the Internet", so begins the explanation in An Architecture for Information in Digital Libraries by William Y. Arms, Christophe Blanchi and Edward A. Overly in the February issue of D-Lib Magazine.

This is a significant article on the follow-up to the American Memory Program and it can be read at

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february97/cnri/02arms1.html#overview.

Hell's teeth! Have they cracked it?

The front cover of the latest issue of the British music industry paper Music Week carries the brazen slogan "Publish... or be robbed!". Framed by a familiar Netscape window bearing the url of the Cerberus Digital Jukebox http://www.cdj.co.uk/ this is the young London-based company's boldest challenge yet to the recording industry and "want-to-be-a-part-of-it-all" sound archives intent on testing the uncharted waters of distributed sounds on the internet. For Cerberus DJ is the guard to the gateway, not to Hell, but to what its creators have termed the "Virtual Pressing Plant - global distribution, no manufacturing, no returned stock, no shipping costs, no high street costs, no piracy".

Cerberus was regarded two years ago as one of the reasons why some areas of the recording industry in the U.K. were reluctant to endorse Project JUKEBOX but one year later a respected member of the National Sound Archive's Technical Advisory Committee, Anthony Griffiths, was singing the company's praises following a demonstration of the system.

Cerberus has mostly been associated with the promotion of rock bands without recording deals but there has clearly always been much more to their mission. To quote from the introductory page of their website,

"Cerberus Central Limited (CCL) set out with the aim of protecting both the composer and the artist by constructing an approved and accountable digital distribution system. This system enables users to purchase CD quality audio on-line, download it to anywhere in the world via the internet and charge a fraction of the cost of a CD. This system became known as The Cerberus Digital Jukebox and soon won approval from the world's publishing and recording industries.

CCL first approached the Music Publishers Association in 1994 at the MPA's Annual General Meeting. CCL explained to the gathering that unless the music industry formed some sort of defence to the illegal distribution of copyright on-line, the very fabric of the industry could be destroyed. CCL presented the MPA with a unique solution, a solution that was relevant to all copyright not just audio.

When a client wishes to purchase a song, he/she sends The Jukebox his/her personal details (Credit Card Number). This is achieved by using Cercure ATM, our credit card transaction software. The Jukebox then creates a unique Cerberus Audio Player for the client. Every time a client wants a song, they send The Jukebox their Player details and The Jukebox then allows them to download a song which has been encoded to their Player. This system, known as "Coded Bitstream Reliant Software" was patented by CCL.

If a client obtains a Cerberus Player and illegally publishes CBR Audio files on the internet, they can be traced from their personal details embedded into their Player. The Player also contains the clients on-line banking details. If you give away your Player you are giving people access to your bank account".

Evidently the most crucial element in the system is Multimedia Protection Protocol (MMP) devised by the Fraunhofer Institute für Integrierte Schaltungen in Erlangen for distributing digital multimedia data with copyright control:

" By using MMP it is possible to distribute digital music tracks and videos freely while keeping control of the usage of the tracks. Using MMP, fees and royalties can be deducted and calculated.

MMP is a flexible system that also can store and transmit additional information (like the International Standard Record Code ISRC, the composer, artist, duration etc.).

Because MMP ciphers parts of the data, it is especially able to protect compressed multimedia data (like ISO/MPEG Layer-3 audio)".

A further boost to their endeavour has come with a massive endorsement from EMI Publishing who have "signed a mandate for the digital distribution of over million songs with CCL. The contract will be extended to cover all operators of Virtual Pressing Plant and will, in effect, clear all publishing rights for over 20% of the world's music for Internet distribution".

Cerberus Central Ltd was started in 1994 and has since opened offices in Japan, USA, South America, Singapore and Australia to become not only the largest UK Internet software developer but the largest in Europe.

Nationals move

Next November Britain's National Sound Archive (NSA) will begin transferring its operations to the British Library's building at St.Pancras a few miles to the north-east of its current address in South Kensington. The move is expected to increase the NSA's business considerably given that it will for the first time be visibly part of a much greater entity and will be able to accommodate more users. One of the biggest difficulties faced by those of us who are planning the move is that the architects never considered that audiovisual services would be run from the new building, at least not in the guise of the NSA's listening and viewing service. The decision to incorporate the NSA into the building was only taken two and a half years ago. Since then we have done our best to squeeze ourselves into existing reading room plans and to endear ourselves to colleagues demoralised by the widely publicised delays to the completion of the new library.

So, from 24th November this year people wanting to use the NSA's information and curatorial services will make their way to St Pancras and the first thing they will have to do is apply for a reader's ticket since access to the British Library reading rooms will continue to be controlled, though it will remain free of charge. The information services will be run from one of the two main humanities reading rooms. Unfortunately there was no space there for the listening service and that has had to be set up in another reading room devoted to rare books and music, which will not open until March or May next year. Therefore people wanting to listen to sounds or watch videos will still have to go to the Exhibition Road address for an interim period of up to six months.

Listening and viewing at St Pancras will be offered in enclosed study carrels: up to twenty-eight carrels have been wired for playback but realistically only eight are going to be readily available to the area surrounding the playback control room and these will probably have to be booked in competition with readers using other parts of the collection. These arrangements are bound to improve once the NSA is established in the new building. Staying out was not considered a sensible option.

How different the experience of our colleagues at the Bibliothèque nationale de France whose impressively massive new building in the inner suburbs of south-east Paris IASA Board members were privileged to view, with Gérald Grunberg as guide, during their recent mid-year meeting. Planned and built in a fraction of the time it has taken to get the British Library completed - but at considerably greater cost - the audiovisual services offered to the general public (as opposed to scholars, whose separate facilities will open later this year) have set a standard which will be difficult to emulate: in this initial phase, 78 seats are available providing access via a terminal with windowed interface to 2,800 video cassettes and 11,500 CD's held in a robotic system, 292 CD-ROMS and 500 hours of audio, 300 of images on a dedicated server. The next phase, for scholars, provides a further 67 seats with access to a server containing 300,000 still images, 30,000 multi-media items on a robotic system and an analogue/manual service to cover the other 300,000 or more items. I hope that Gérald will be able to offer IASA members a more detailed survey in a future issue of the Journal.

One area where the British solution can be expected to prevail is in the integration of research documents. While you can listen and view with ease in Paris, you will not be able to consult the scores and manuscripts from the music library since they are to remain in the BnF's old building in central Paris. In London's modest compromise the policy of closer integration between collections and services, as part of the overall corporate drive, has at least meant that written and recorded music will be accessible within the same reading room.

I look forward to comparing the audiovisual experiences of these two national libraries at the 1998 IASA Conference which will be hosted by the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Chris Clark

Calendar of events

This Information Bulletin was compiled by:

The Editor of IASA, Chris Clark,
The British Library National Sound Archive, 29 Exhibition Road, London SW7 2AS, UK,
tel. 44 171 412 7411, fax 44 171 412 7413, e-mail chris.clark@bl.uk,

and
Elsebeth Kirring, Statsbiblioteket, Universitetsparken, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark,
tel. 45 86 12 20 22, fax 45 86 20 26 36, e-mail ek@statsbib.aau.dk.

Printed in Budapest, Hungary
PLEASE SEND ANY COPY FOR INFORMATION BULLETIN NO 22 BY 15 JUNE 1997