Janet Gertz
Director, Preservation and Digital Conversion
Columbia University
Stephen Paul Davis
Director, Libraries Digital Program
Columbia University
From 2008 to 2010 Columbia University Libraries preserved 1,200 hours of seriously endangered, high value, analog oral history recordings, in a project generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Challenges in the project included:
- Working with older reel-to-reel and cassette recordings that were not well-inventoried or preserved
- Reassembling longitudinal, multipart, not-necessarily-contiguous audio content
- Working with an outside audio preservation vendor to develop effective workflows and standards-compliant metadata (including METS, MODS, and AES-X098B-draft)
- Ingesting the digital files and metadata into our Fedora repository for asset management, preservation and access
The successful outcomes of this project have provided a standard, replicable approach to digitizing historic audio collections that other institutions can also use.
https://www1.columbia.edu/sec/cu/libraries/bts/mellon_audio/index.html