Author: Geoffrey C. Willard

The AV Artifact Atlas has been one of the Stanford Media Preservation Lab’s longest running projects (for background on what it is, see this short 2013 post), but recently it has been moved to GitHub. Update your links!

AVAA site: https://bavc.github.io/avaa/

Link to GitHub repository: https://github.com/bavc/avaa

As always, contributors are most welcome, and hopefully the site’s new home on GitHub will encourage engagement. Please help us:

– Edit content

– Add new content

The Allen Ginsberg papers in the Department of Special Collections is truly the collection that keeps on giving. We here at the media lab have digitized a huge portion of the media (current count: 2000+ items), yet our interest in it remains high because of the sheer amount of gems hidden within. Even if we didn’t enjoy Ginsberg, the vast amount of acquaintances he recorded from the 1950s until the 1990s would provide endless entertainment. 

This past August, the journal of the American Institute for Conservation published a paper by Sarah Norris titled “Toward An Ontology Of Audio Preservation” which features the Stanford Media Preservation Lab (SMPL) as a case study. SMPL is presented alongside the Guggenheim Museum and IRENE (Image, Reconstruct, Erase, Noise, Etc.), a non-contact digitization technique developed in 2003 by Dr. Carl Haber at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in Norris’ philosophical analysis of audio digitization approaches. 

The Stanford Media Preservation Lab has kicked around the idea of building a dedicated Digital Audio Tape (DAT) “ripping” workstation around a Digital Data Storage (DDS) drive for a few years, but we never pursued it in earnest. We assumed the benefits of using a computer drive to read audio DATs largely centered around extraction time and reporting. Transferring a DAT in a conventional deck is done in real-time, whereas a DDS drive, we were told, would rougly cut the time in half depending on the speed of the drive (Peter Oleksik’s retrospective on the Fugazi archive mentioned speeds up to 4x real-time using the DDS method with a Sony SDT-9000 drive and DATXtract). We also liked the idea of accompanying logs identifying where dropouts occurred. Still, we were skeptical whether such a system would be better than one designed around multiple conventional decks. Was there a way to test both methods without investing a bunch of money in late 1990s computer components?