David will will be speaking with Skip Elsheimer (A/V Geeks) on the panel “Introduction to Transcoding: Tools and Processes”. From the programme description:

• “Digital formats evolve over time. This session will demonstrate the basics of transcoding and the utilities, strategies and challenges involved in efficiently providing access to digital audiovisual media collections. It will examine software-based tools and applications, identifying what to look out for, how to evaluate lossless and lossy transcoding methods, quality control, and verification.”

Those of you who have seen David’s and Skip’s Digitization 101 panels at the past several AMIA conferences know they are highly informative while also being highly entertaining and accessible to a wide audience, opening up the seemingly obscure world of digital video and audio in a way that is as tangible and revelatory as inspecting a film by hand. David has been developing some new avenues of investigation to discuss about transcoding, so this should be another great presentation.

Other speakers over the two days include Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive), David Rosenthal (LOCKSS, Stanford University), Jeff Ubois (PrestoCentre), Matthew Addis (IT Innovation), Richard Wright (BBC R&D), Peter Kaufman (Intelligent Television), Marius Snyders (PrestoPRIME Project), Jan Müller (Managing Director, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision), Paul Miller (Cloud of Data), and Seamus Ross (Faculty of Information, University of Toronto).

Full details and registration information can be found at http://screeningthefuture.eventbrite.com/
Also see
PrestoPrime http://www.prestoprime.org/
and
Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision http://instituut.beeldengeluid.nl
for more audiovisual preservation information.

9. They also list 337 audio file formats.

8. These numbers do not take into consideration the different release versions of each format.

7. Nor do they begin to approach the number of variable applications of codexes, settings, and other options.

6. An archivist may run into any one of these permutations some day, and will have to deal with the common, the obscure, and the obsolete equally to figure out how to make them accessible and maintain that accessibility.

5. There is no great joy for the archivist in the continual establishment of new file formats.

4. But you needn’t be caught flat-footed.

3. Having a plan in place for the ingest, monitoring, and migration of digital collections will help you control the process rather than feeling controlled by virtual strings.

2. Be prepared to address What Was? What Now? What Next?

1. And there are great resources to help you establish best practices and manage your digital collection:

• Library of Congress Sustainability of Digital Formats & NDIIPP
• Preserving Access to Digital Information (PADI)
• AES Technical Committee on Archiving, Restoration and Digital Libraries
• And more in our Links page and throughout avpreserve.com.

— Joshua Ranger

This was the same person whose father lost a number of paperclips in his computers disc drive while trying to poke around to make it run faster, so I wasn’t so sure about her technological reliability. That is until I saw this Wired Wiki post the other day on How to Fix a Scratched CD. There it was, tips not only on using (abrasive) toothpaste to polish out scratches on an optical disc, but also anti-glare spray, Brasso metal polish, wax or something called Meguire’s Deep Crystal Paint Cleaner which is for automotive use.

It sounds crazy, and normally something like this would send me off mumbling about archivally sound practices and how kids just don’t respect things anymore and grumble grumble grumble, but this time I didn’t have that same reaction. Maybe it’s because it’s hard to care about the piles and piles of commercially produced discs out there. Even without being loofahed, they aren’t going to last all that long.

Or maybe it’s because I’ve seen enough ad hoc or re-purposed tools being used in archives and on collections that these things don’t phase me anymore (audio engineers sometimes seem part mad scientist). Maybe these make-dos are not the best thing for the media, but the simple fact is that many of the tools we need to do our work have not been created or are no longer being produced. Cleverness and inventiveness are necessary traits of the archivist / preservationist, and who knows when some out of left field solution might be the correct one.

Or maybe it’s because these kinds of solutions, while dealing with digital content, are actually more about physical process. They are about solving the ways that physical degradation like scratches impede the mechanisms of disc reading.

That last must be it, because what bothers me about the wiki on “how to fix a scratched CD”  is the cavalier attitude about file formats and blindly trusting computers & digital distribution.

The authors conclude that “you don’t have to worry about scratching your MP3 like you can a compact disc,” as if that means you don’t have to worry about other issues with digital media. And they suppose that, “If you lose your music, chances are, in the future, your music store will replenish the music you bought from them for you at little or no cost,” which is a rather optimistic outlook that commercial media providers will suddenly turn so altruistic.

The kicker seems to be that they recommend using Error Correction when importing particularly damaged materials to something like iTunes as MP3. As our own Dave Rice has shown, digital file transfer and transcoding are particularly fraught areas in maintaining a persistent object. The audio of an error corrected CD may sound fine, but reformulating the digital makeup of a file is the same as reformulating its physical structure. Even though you cannot always see the results as you can with a physical object, the changes have occurred and should be taken with the same consideration as how you physically handle an asset or what kind of image storage/transfer decisions you make.

We’re moving toward the Cloud, but that doesn’t mean we should let our conceptual hold of our media become ethereal as well. You don’t have to understand every smidgen of code (that’s the technical term for a piece of code, isn’t it?), but working in a world where archives are becoming more digi-centric does require that you understand how file formats work and what their transfer and transformation mean. It seems like starting all over once again, but its better than accessioning 40 boxes of minty fresh smelling discs.

— Joshua Ranger