Archival Sound Recordings
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Grant Holder:
Archival Sound Recordings is the result of a development project to increase access to the British Library Sound Archive's extensive collections. The British Library holds one of the world’s foremost sound archives with a collection of over 3.5 million audio recordings. These come from all over the world and cover the entire range of recorded sound from music, drama and literature, to oral history, wildlife and environmental sounds. You can search and browse information about all the sounds held in the British Library at our online catalogue.
This website delivers a selection of that rich audio heritage in the form of tens of thousands of digitised recordings and their associated documentation.
Conversion of data in Marc to XML, Production of compressed JPEG files from uncompressed TIFF files for web dissemination
| Project start date: 2004-01 | Project end date: 2009-01 |
Subject domains:
| Methods used | Category |
|---|---|
| 2d Scanning and photography | Data capture |
| Content-based sound retrieval | Data analysis |
| Documentation | Strategy and project management |
| Risk management | Strategy and project management |
| Sound analysis | Data analysis |
| Sound editing | Data structuring and enhancement |
| Streaming media | Data publishing and dissemination |
| System quality assurance and code testing | Strategy and project management |
| Text recognition | Data capture |
| Usability analysis | Strategy and project management |
| Interface design | Data publishing and dissemination |
| Curation | Strategy and project management |
| preservation | Strategy and project management |
| sound | Content types |
| music | Discipline |
| text | Content types |
Funding sources:
Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)
Content types created:
Sound, Still Image/Graphics, Text
Software tools used:
Quicktime, Audacity, Sonic Visualiser, Praat, Windows Media Player, Winamp, Avisoft SASLab Lite, Raven Lite, Express Scribe, Audiograbber, Exact Audio Copy
Source material used:
Music, spoken word and environmental sounds held in the British Library Sound Archive.
Content was initially evaluated according to: research and teaching interests, technical digitisation requirements, IPR risks, preservation needs and quality of documentation. A consultation was then undertaken with potential users of the collection to be digitised.
Digital resource created:
36,000 records have been digitised together with images of record labels.
The searchable and browseable ASR website offers access to the metadata and to a large number of universally accessible recordings.
The website makes use of Web 2.0 technologies. These allow users to add tags, to contribute contextual commentary and share a personal list of favourites with others.
Data Formats created:
MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (MP3), Windows Media Audio (WMA), JPEG, TIFF, XML, pdf, BWF
Metadata standards employed:
Dublin Core, simple (DC), Machine Readable Cataloguing (MARC), Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS)
Project staff and expertise:
| Principal staff member: | Peter Findlay, Michelangelo Staffolani, Eva del Rey, Melanie Bourne, Ellen Hebden, Elisa Pettinelli Barrett, Niall Anderson, Rehanna Kheshgi |
|---|---|
| Other staff: | |
| External expertise: |
| Metadata on this arts-humanities.net record | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) of record | Sarah Maskell |
| Title | Archival Sound Recordings |
| Record created | 2010-04-22 |
| Record updated | 2010-04-29 12:19 |
| URL of record | http://www.arts-humanities.net/node/2680 |
| Citation of record | Sarah Maskell: Archival Sound Recordings . <http://www.arts-humanities.net/node/2680> created: 2010-04-22, last updated 2010-04-29 12:19 |