Description:
The Audio Engineering Society(AES) has a Technical
Committee--Archival Recording and Digital Library
(TC-ARDL) which started into action in November 2000.
I'm a member. Their work is sophisticated from an
audio engineering viewpoint, and naive from the
digital point of view. The work product of the group
is not yet firmly agreed upon, but is likely to
include recommendations for restoration of
deteriorating media and preparation for digital
preservation archiving. (E.g., suppose you had in
your attic a 1955 recording of a folk artist now
regarded as famous, and some archivist wanted it. The
media would have somewhat deteriorated, and we'd want
to enter the best possible digital representation into
the archive.)
The suggestion that follows takes into account that
the work of this committee and your students' work
would not have easily reconciled schedules and paces,
and also an invited paper (of a preliminary nature)
that I am within a week of submitting for the AES
Journal.
I suggest that your students could collaborate with me
to write FOR PUBLICATION another paper for AESJ (or
some other target YTBD) a paper recommending
end-to-end process and first pass at standards for
audio archiving, with the audio channel positioned to
be elements in XML documents.
I don't need to spell out for you the engineering
details that need to be considered, beyond mentioning
that part of the work would be to find all the other
groups doing things that need to be related to this.
Obviously, the work would have good synergy with that
for ETD archiving--both drawing from and feeding
into--as well as with other things I have planned, and
would be much appreciated by AES if it were well done.
I believe I have "on tap" a first-rate audio engineer
to advise on those things that neither the students
nor I know much about. As feed, I would have the mail
of the listserv which TC-ARDL is working. (That
already amounts to about 25 pages of this and that, of
which I myself have written 30%.)