This seemed to be the point at which some dawning realizations gelled, at which a nagging thought in the back of my head became a lens projecting truth onto the screen of my mind. Archive is a word that should be archived. Archive is a word that is dead.

The Association for Recorded Sound Collections Technical Committee (ARSC TC) recently announced the release of their “Study of Embedded Metadata Support in Audio Recording Software: Summary of Findings and Conclusions”. AudioVisual Preservation Solutions President Chris Lacinak and Consultant Peter Oleksik played significant roles in co-ordinating the study and authoring the report, along with invaluable contributions [...]

AVPS Founder and President Chris Lacinak will be co-presenting the workshop “Got Metadata? Historical, Cultural, and Future Issues of Information Association for Archiving Audio Materials” at the 131st Audio Engineering Society (AES) Convention taking place in New York this week. Along with workshop Chair Thomas Ross Miller (New York University) and co-Panelist Holger Grossmann (Fraunhofer [...]

The cycle of generational context would suggest that I scoff at such softening as I continue to cling to my childhood anger at the dismantling of social, educational, and arts support in the 1980s. Reagan, too, has been making a comeback of late as both sides of the aisle fight over who best represents his ideology and his legacy. Either I’m a stubborn-headed fool or this is a good sign that I’m not too old yet.

Azimuth Adjustment for Magnetic Audio Recordings By Audrey Young and Peter Oleksik In magnetic audio tape recording, azimuth refers to the measure of the angle between the tape heads and the physical tape itself, the ideal being a perfectly perpendicular 90º. The audio signal is recorded onto magnetic tape in a pattern resembling a series [...]

Metadata is an integral component of digital preservation and an essential part of a digital object. Files without appropriate metadata lack the basic means required for computing systems and humans to understand, interpret, or manage them. Effectively, there is no preservation or meaningful access without metadata. This presentation by Chris Lacinak covers the why, what [...]

AVPS President, Chris Lacinak was recently quoted in the Rolling Stone article “File Not Found: The Record Industry’s Digital Storage Crisis” (written by David Browne and published in the December 23, 2010-January 11, 2011 issue). Mr. Browne interviewed Chris as an expert reference in the area of digital preservation and file management of audiovisual materials [...]

Philadelphia has become a popular destination for AVPS the past several months, what with all the conferences and marathons and such. The love continues (in a brotherly sort of way) at the upcoming Music Library Association Annual Meeting. This 80th edition will take place February 9th-12th, 2011 at the historic Loews Hotel in the Philadelphia [...]

I guess it’s a sign that I’m not a kid reading comic books in the 1980s anymore, but the two most interesting things to me about the series were 1) my amazement at the astonishingly clunky or just lame superhero/villain names, and 2) the fact that The Joker kills Ted Turner stand-in Harold J Standish III in order to steal ownership to the copyrights over colorized silent comedies.

All -philes are a bit odd, but I’ve always thought of audiophiles as the mad scientists of the preservation world.