Category Archives: Digitisation

Adventures in audiovisual digitisation (part 2)

Following on from my last post I thought I would provide some information on the equipment that we are using for the digitisation (or capture) of audio held on various audio formats. As stated before, we have had to compromise in various areas:

  • We have purchased second-hand equipment as that way it is possible to use semi-professional equipment. There were no newer models, within our budget, for semi-professional use, only those created for domestic purposes (which didn’t have XLR connectors or noise reduction settings for example).
  • We have borrowed or been given equipment from other departments around the University, no longer used by that department due to its obsolescence, but perfect for the requirements of our project.
  • And we have had to outsource some digitisation (so far of DAT and U-Matic).

Audio cassettes

  • Cassette Deck: We are using the Denon DN 790-R. After lots of research I chose this as an it was affordable option for a semi-professional cassette deck, and it was a deck that I could actually find for sale at the time I was looking (we paid about £300 for one off of Ebay). I was looking for a deck which had XLR connectors and a variety of dolby noise reduction settings. Best practice (for example see Sound Directions, page 20 or Digitising Speech Recordings for Archival Purposes, page 8) would dictate that you find a cassette deck with XLR connectors as these are important for achieving a balanced signal. Noise reduction is also important, and if the original cassette was recorded with a noise reduction applied, then this should also be applied during digitisation. If the cassettes were recorded in the 1980s/1990s Dolby B (in particular) might have been applied. From experience within the British Stand-Up Comedy Archive, cassettes which were recorded professionally seem to have been recorded with a noise reduction applied (and sometimes this is even noted on the cassette which is really helpful!) but those more ‘home made’ recordings often don’t have any noise reduction; in these cases it is best to transfer without any noise reduction.
  • Audio capture card: We’re using a Roland UA-55 Quad-Capture audio capture card, again as this was quite an affordable option (c.£150). This is, in effect, an external sound card; the alternative would be to use an internal sound card with XLR connectors (which you’d have to install). We did actually purchase a good video capture card to use for both our audio and video digitisation work, but this had compatibility issues with our PC and so I sought an affordable capture card so we could start digitizing audio (we are using this video card in a mac tower for our VHS work though). An easy alternative (but which would not result in the best quality capture, especially if you are digitising for preservation) would be to use the PC’s existing internal sound card if you were digitising using stereo phono connectors (not recommened for preservation work).
  • Cables: two XLR connectors to connect the deck to the capture card; a usb cable connects the capture card to the PC (this would probably come with your audio capture card).
  • Software: we’re using Adobe Audition as it is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud package. As we are using some other Adobe CC programmes for image digitisation and embedding metadata (such as Bridge and Photoshop) this seemed the best option for us.  A free and good option is Audacity (http://audacityteam.org/). When capturing audio it is best practice to capture to at least 24 bit 48kHz (fine for spoken word, although for music it is recommended to captured 24 bit 96kHz). More information on this can be found on the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives website and ‘guidelines for the production and preservation of digital audio objects’
Cassette and MiniDisc Deck used for BSUCA digitisation / transfer

Cassette and MiniDisc Deck used for BSUCA digitisation / transfer

MiniDisc

MiniDisc capture has been a bit more of a compromise, in terms of our equipment:

  • MiniDisc Deck: We are using the Sony MiniDisc MD5-JE530 as this is a deck that was already available to us from within Campus Support here at the University of Kent (so free. We have also since been donated another MiniDisc deck by the School of Engineering and Digital Arts – thanks EDA!)
  • Audio capture card: Roland UA-55 Quad-Capture USB Audio/midi interface (price as above). The MD5-JE530 has an optical digital connection, whereas the UA-55 has a coaxial digital connection only. We didn’t want to purchase an additional audio capture card just for MiniDiscs so we purchased…
  • …the Pro-Signal PSG08095 Optical to Coaxial Adaptor (under £10) and a…
  • ….Digital Audio Coaxial Cable (1m) (about £2)
  • Software: Adobe Audition (as above). MiniDiscs used the ATRAC (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding) compression which sampled at 16 bit 44.1kHz and so when transferring MiniDiscs we capture at this rate (capturing at a higher bit rate and sampling frequency will only increase the file size but not the quality).

I aim to provide more updates soon, looking at how we are transferring digital files held on other physical media (such as audio CD and DVD), and in time we will also report on our VHS digitisation.

 

Reading list:

  • Jisc Digital Media, ‘Equipping an Audio Digitisation System’, http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/guide/equipping-an-audio-digitisation-system/show-hidden
  • Dietrich Schüller, Audio and video carriers: Recording principles, storage and handling, maintenance of equipment, format and equipment obsolescence, http://www.tape-online.net/docs/audio_and_video_carriers.pdf
  • Mike Casey and Bruce Gordon, Sound Directions: Best Practices for Audio Preservation, http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/sounddirections/papersPresent/sd_bp_07.pdf
  • International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives, IASA-TC 03 The Safeguarding of the Audio Heritage: Ethics, Principles and Preservation Strategy, version 3 December 2005, http://www.iasa-web.org/sites/default/files/downloads/publications/TC03_English.pdf
  • Bartek Plichta and Mark Kornbluh, Digitizing Speech Recordings for Archival Purposes, http://www.historicalvoices.org/papers/audio_digitization.pdf

 

Adventures in audiovisual digitisation (part 1)

Part of the mission of the British Stand-Up Comedy Archive (BSUCA) Beacon project has been to establish standards, workflows, and policies with regards to digitisation and digital preservation, with the aim to inform the future collecting and preservation activities of the University’s Special Collections & Archives department.  Partly we wanted to see what digitisation work we could do in-house, if any, or if we would need to outsource the digitisation. Digitising audio-visual material is not easy, which is why few archives undertake AV digitisation in-house, or at all, and perhaps why there are few accessible resources for those trying to find out how to digitise in-house:

  1. There are problems of the degradation of various AV formats. This is one of the reasons why we need to digitise material on formats that are likely to degrade (otherwise we may lose the recording). This degradation can cause problems in your workflow; for example having the knowledge to spot mould, sticky shed, and then what to do about this, or how to splice a broken tape or reel (see point 3).
  2. There are also problems of technical obsolescence. This is another reasons for digitisation; the format may be stable (reel-to-reel tapes can be fairly stable) but the equipment to replay them (and therefore digitise them) are increasingly becoming obsolete; if we don’t digitise the material soon, whilst there is still affordable equipment, we may lose the opportunity for the material to be preserved and made accessible. For the formats within the BSUCA this is common when you consider the date of much of our material, which ranges from 1973 through to 2016. We currently have AV recordings on: audio cassette, reel-to-reel, MiniDisc, DAT, audio CD, VHS, Betacam, DVCam, DVCam mini, MiniDV, U-Matic, DVD, as well as digital originals (wav and mp3 files). Many of these formats were market-driven (MiniDisc for example) and were hailed as the next great format before being usurped by newer formats which were more affordable or more accessible. Another connected issue is that equipment may be available, but it is more likely than not to be second hand, and in need of servicing or maintenance: you do not want your equipment to compromise your digitisation work.
  3. Finally, a major issue when digitising AV for preservation and access is that of quality control. Much AV digitisation is carried out by trained audio engineers (who are able to spot and solve the issues identified in points 1 and 2).

It was an important part of this project to see whether we could digitise material in-house, with limited equipment and expertise. This is because we recognise that we are going to receive an increasing amount of audiovisual material within the BSUCA collections, due to the nature of the Archive, but also that we are likely to receive more AV material generally as part of Special Collections & Archives as we collect more material from the mid- and late- twentieth century. Outsourcing digitisation can be expensive; you obviously benefit hugely from the expertise of trained audiovisual engineers, but if AV material is a large part of your collections, outsourcing all of it is not feasible due to budgetary constraints.

Audio from the Andy de la Tour Collection

Audio from the Andy de la Tour Collection

The situation we have found ourselves in with regards equipment and expertise has definitely been one of compromises. For example:

  • We have settled with purchasing second-hand equipment as that way it is possible to use semi-professional equipment; there are no newer models, within our budget, for semi-professional use, only those created for domestic purposes.
  • We have also borrowed (or been given) equipment from other departments around the University, no longer used by that department due to its obsolescence, but perfect for the requirements of our project.
  • And we have sometimes settled on outsourcing the digitisation (so far DAT and U-Matic).

When we started the BSUCA project in January last year (2015) I found it quite difficult to find easily accessible information about what hardware and software we’d need for digitising audio-visual material, where to find equipment for sale, as well as workflows for how to actually start digitising material. The resources from Jisc Digital Media on digitising audio and video were really helpful, as were the Guidelines for the preservation of sound recordings guide from the Endangered Archives Programme at the British Library. However, I found that the equipment recommended was no longer widely available, so I did a lot of extra research on particular models which would be affordable but also meet the standards we require. In case other archivists, curators, interested people, are thinking about digitising audio-visual material in house, I thought in my next post I’d list the equipment we have been using (starting with audio cassettes and MiniDiscs), and why (I’m not endorsing any particular models, other makes/models are available!) and later I’ll aim to share our workflows.

Interviews with comedians on DATs (Digital Audio Tapes) from the John Pidgeon Collection

Interviews with comedians on DATs (Digital Audio Tapes) from the John Pidgeon Collection

Some resources:

Interesting facts about the British Stand-Up Comedy Archive

1. The British Stand-Up Comedy Archive contains 22 collections; we have been collecting material since 2013.

BSUCA collections on our Calm cataloguing system

BSUCA collections on our Calm cataloguing system

2. We have material dating from 1970 to the present day, documenting the rise of alternative comedy and stand-up comedy. We are keen to collect material from relevant areas of performance including alternative cabaret, performance poetry and working men’s club comedy.

3. We have collected a range of material in a variety of formats (including photographs, scripts, diaries, audiovisual recording, posters, contracts) and for a variety of purposes (promotion, academic research, for broadcast).

IMG_20151130_135848

4. Throughout 2015 we have been developing new workflows to ensure that the recordings in the archive held on legacy audiovisual formats (such as cassette tapes, MiniDisc and DAT) are digitised and accessible for researchers today and in the future.

5. The digitisation of both printed and audiovisual material means that we can provide samples of representative content from the archive on platforms such as Flickr and Soundcloud as well as on our blog.

6. We have worked to ensure a range of content from the comedy world has been collected and we have been keen to engage with comedy promoters and venues. Monika Bobinska donated a large collection of material from the Meccano Club (1985-1995) and Peter Grahame has given material from Downstairs at the Kings Head (established in 1981). We also have material from more recent clubs and promoters, including The Folkestone Comedy Club and What The Frock! Comedy.

Meccano Club Bookings Book.

Meccano Club Bookings Book. February-March 1995. Featuring acts including Tracy Brothers, Al Murray, Nick Wilty and Dylan Moran. (c) Monika Bobinska

7. One strength of the BSUCA collections is the number of unique, unedited interviews with comedians, recorded for purposes including academic research and publication (Oliver Double Collection), and radio broadcast (John Pidgeon Collection, Andrew Sherlock Radio Collection).

Interviews with comedians on DATs (Digital Audio Tapes) from the John Pidgeon Collection

Interviews with comedians on DATs (Digital Audio Tapes) from the John Pidgeon Collection

8. We’ve had some incredible events this year, with performers such as Mark Thomas, Attila the Stockbroker, Richard Herring, Stewart Lee, and Phill Jupitus (at the University of Kent), and Jo Brand, Susan Calman, and Stephen K. Amos (at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe). These events were all recorded and can be accessed in our reading room at the Templeman Library, University of Kent.

Phill Jupitus talking about a Red Wedge Comedy leaflet which cartooned for (as Porky the Poet). Photo Matt Wilson

Phill Jupitus talking about a Red Wedge Comedy leaflet which cartooned for (as Porky the Poet) during an in-conversation event with Oliver Double in September 2015. Photo Matt Wilson

 

9. We are holding a joint conference with the British Cartoon Archive ‘Comedy On Stage and Page: satirical cartoons and stand-up‘ (14-15th January 2016), which will explore issues including the relationship between the audience and the comedian, writing shows, the comedy industry, censorship, and women in comedy, and also highlight the Stand-Up Comedy Archive collections.

10. Alongside the conference we will be hosting a joint exhibition with the British Cartoon Archive, providing access to material from the archive and explaining more about its establishment, development and collections in the new Templeman Library gallery area.

On metadata and digital preservation tools

We’ve recently contributed to the Greatbear’s blog about some of our audiovisual material, and have discussed how we have prioritised digitization of audiovisual material, the digital preservation tools we’ve been using, metadata, and digital file formats. You can read our contributions on the Greatbear blog.

Audiovisual material from the Linda Smith Collection and Tony Allen Collection

Audiovisual material from the Linda Smith Collection and Tony Allen Collection

Its been a while since I’ve shared some links that I’ve found useful lately, so I thought I’d do that now too…

DigiPres Commons is a website providing links to various other resources (such as those provided by the Open Preservation Foundation, the Digital Curation Centre, and the Internet Archive), and includes links to digital preservation tools, information on file formats, digital preservation FAQs, and help when writing a business case for digital preservation.

 

Linda Smith's notes for her appearance on Room 101, broadcast 17 November 2003

Linda Smith’s notes for her appearance on Room 101, broadcast 17 November 2003

The BBC Genome website has proved incredibly useful when sorting, organising and listing material within the Stand-Up Comedy Archive. Many of our depositors have also worked in TV and radio, as well as within the stand-up/cabaret circuit, and when we have unlabeled audio-visual material, or notes scribbled down for a radio or tv programme, we’ve generally been able to find out the date and station of broadcast using the Genome website. The Genome project contains listings information printed in the Radio Times between 1923 and 2009, and allows you to search by contributor or programme name.  You can also get involved, and help provide additional information if there have been spelling or punctuation errors during the scanning process.  This is a really great resource!

 

Digital Archiving at the University of York is a blog from Jenny Mitcham at the University of York. Jenny provides lots of interesting insights into the work of a Digital Archivist, and the blog has proved really interesting reading, particularly with relation to her investigations into floppy disks and her own use of digital preservation tools.

British Stand-Up Comedy Archive spring update

Elspeth Millar writes:

It’s been quite a while since we blogged, so we thought we’d provide a quick update on how the project is progressing, and our other activities over these first few months of the British Stand-Up Comedy Archive Beacon project.

Collections
We’ve been in contact with a number of potential donors involved in comedy (from comedians to comedy promoters) regarding further deposits – we should be able to announce more details soon! In the meantime, we’ve been sorting, listing and beginning to catalogue our four main collections: Linda Smith, Mark Thomas, Tony Allen, and John Pidgeon.

We’ve also been working with the UK Web Archive to establish a ‘British Stand-Up Comedy Archive’ special collection, to capture websites relating to the material that we physically/digitally hold, but also (by capturing websites with comedy listings, news and reviews) to capture a snapshot of the UK comedy scene for future researchers.

 

Events
Unfortunately we had to cancel our first ‘in conversation’ event with Alexei Sayle in February as Oliver Double broke his hip! Olly will soon be back on campus and our (now) first ‘in conversation’ event is with Richard Herring on 8th April at the Gulbenkian. Further information can be found on The Gulbenkian’s website. The event will be filmed and added to the British Stand-Up Comedy Archive collections.

herring

Format explorations for digitisation
One aspect of the British Stand-Up Comedy Archive Beacon project, the one-year funded project as part of the University of Kent’s 50th anniversary celebrations, is to investigate the choice of formats for capturing material in a digital form for long-term preservation.  There are a number of factors to consider such as:

  • Sustainability (how ‘open’ is the format? What is the quality i.e. uncompressed, lossless compression, lossy compression? Does the format have good metadata support?),
  • Implementation (how hard technically is it to implement the format? Is there a wide availability of tools for implementation?)
  • And cost (what are the storage and network costs? What are the required software and hardware costs?)

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time researching our options and making decisions on which formats we will use.

We have begun our digitisation activities by digitising paper items (posters, flyers, scripts and notes) and photographs (prints and negatives).  We have chosen to capture these as uncompressed TIFF files, although we haven’t ruled out JPEG 2000 as an option for future digitisation. JPEG 2000 has a number of advantages, including smaller file sizes meaning lower storage and network costs, but disadvantages in that compression is used (either lossless or lossy) and there is less available, affordable, software for compression and decompression. Indeed, one of the reasons we haven’t started by using JPEG 2000 is due to this ‘implementation’ factor discussed above (at the moment we don’t have the right tools to create and view images as JPEG 2000 ).

Preview article for Linda Smith Stand-up in Bradford, 1987

Preview article for Linda Smith Stand-up in Bradford, 1987

Poster advertising Linda Smith Stand-Up Show at the Riverside Studios on March 25th as part of 'Shelter presents the Full House Club'.

Poster advertising Linda Smith Stand-Up Show at the Riverside Studios on March 25th as part of ‘Shelter presents the Full House Club’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This week we will begin digitising audio-visual material, beginning with audio cassette tapes.  We will be capturing these as LPCM wav files, the format recommended as the archival master for reformatting audio, and provide access using mp3 files.

We are still deliberating over the format that we use for capture and storage of moving image material, primarily held on VHS in our current collections. Unlike with audio and images there is no agreed archival standard (nor one codec/wrapper combination that is being used by many archives); indeed many large archives around the world use different formats.  I’m grateful that we have been able to seek advice from colleagues at The National Archives, the British Library, and the Austrian Mediathek, on their choice of format, and we should make a decision on this (taking into consideration the issues discussed above) within the next month.

I’ve also been spending time investigating tools we could use as part of digital preservation and digital asset management, including tools for ensuring data integrity (checksum tools) and for embedding metadata into files, including BWF Metaedit, which was created by the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) and AV Preserve.

This is just an overview, and I aim to provide more detailed updates about our choices, and the tools we are using, over the coming months.  In the meantime, here are some of the links/reading that I’ve found useful between January and March!

Audio-visual

Images

Metadata

Copyright

Tools we’ve been trying:

  • BWF Metaedit – for embedding metadata into wave files
  • DROID – The National Archives’ tool for profiling file types and creating hash sums (checksums)
  • Blackbush – a checksum tool generating MD5 hash files developed for the British Library’s Sound Archive