On Wednesday I did a talk for a get-together of the North West Archives Network at Central Library. It was a lovely day of presentations about fascinating photo and audio-visual projects across the region, with none of the stuffiness of an ARA event.
I wasn’t sure how to structure my bit on sound archives fundraising. My aim, as usual, was to try to break down what can seem like a bit of a ‘difficult’ thing when you come across it in a box alongside paper and photographs. For the last couple of years I’ve been looking at this poster on the sound studio wall. The British Library produced it as part of the National Lottery Heritage Fund-supported Unlocking Our Sound Heritage.
Being a chippy north-of-northerner, I can’t help thinking that the British Library love to use a big fancy word where a short simple one would do just fine. But actually the poster is a really useful layout of the main steps in approaching sound archives. And crucially these steps are common to any type of archive activity – so hopefully they shouldn’t terrify people familiar with working in an archive and dealing with old random stuff.
The poster’s opening message is quite an apocalyptic one – THIS STUFF IS LITERALLY DYING AND IF WE DON’T DO SOMETHING NOW IT’LL BE TOO LATE! (I paraphrase ever so slightly.)
This is clearly an important message for funders to understand – it’s the driver – but the rest of the poster explains what can practically be done about it.
The IDENTIFY stage involves figuring out what kind of formats you have. For this the British Library’s guide to identifying sound carriers is a very useful reference document. In case you like your information in video form, our own brilliant Sian Williams produced this excellent video on identifying sound formats.
Knowing what kind of formats you have really helps figuring out what to do next. The obsolescence thing affects analogue formats differently from digital ones. Nobody’s making good analogue tape machines any more, the tapes are degrading steadily over time, and fewer people over time have the skills to fix the machines when they go wrong.
In contrast it’s quite easy to get good, new CD drives. Yet CDs (particularly CD-Rs which were often used for unique archives) are notoriously prone to catastrophic failure. And minidisc transfer is reliant on proprietary algorithms. So actually you could argue that some newer digital formats are just as at-risk as analogue ones.
Next up is INVENTORISE:
I *think* what they mean is make a list of what you have. For this it’s a really good idea to use a spreadsheet with columns for:
- Title (what the tape label says)
- Date (if it has one)
- Format (see above)
- Manufacturer and type (eg. if you have lots of Ampex 406 it’s likely to be horrible and sticky! A bit of googling will soon identify any known issues…)
- Duration (do the sleeves say how long the recordings are? All digitisation happens in real time so this is pretty important)
- Extent (are there ten radio news items on one reel? Or is one oral history interview on seven cassettes recorded over three sessions?)
- Condition (is the tape warped? Does it fall away from the spool smoothly, or stick to it? Can you see any residue or mould? Is there any water damage evident on the box?)
- Other stuff (how many sides are described in documentation? Are there any notes on the quality or equipment of recording?)
What you’re doing here is trying to describe what’s on the shelves, what the tapes *say* they are. You might not be able to listen to them yet. But this stage 1 catalogue is absolutely critical for everything that follows.
Next is PRIORITISE. The British Library’s audit of sound archives in 2015 identified 100,000 tapes held in private and public collections across the region. As part of UOSH, the North West hub here at the library could only digitise 5,000 of them over thee years. So we had to figure out which ones it made sense to concentrate on. To do this we gave each collection a score for:
- Risk (how urgent is it to get the audio off the original carrier?)
- Resonance (is this stuff interesting? does it tell us stuff about our history? will people enjoy listening to it and want to re-use it?
- Rights (how easy will it be to use this stuff? who owns the copyright? are there data protection risks in it?)
You’ll probably know already what you’d like to work on in your collection. But funders like us to showing our working like this.
If you just need a boxful of things doing, there’s no point investing yourself in the expensive vintage and IT equipment you’d need to digitise it. It will make much more sense in this scenario for you to subcontract the digitisation to a private company (companies like Digital Converters cater for the family market while there are heritage-focused firms like Townsweb and audio specialists like Great Bear). Or you could use a heritage organisation like us. Whoever you go with, make sure you understand their equipment, experience, software, digital formats and quality control. Also it’s crucial to have a provision in your contract about what happens if things go wrong.
A little bit of digitisation goes a long way – being able to share just a couple of items from a collection can help you explain why the rest needs looking after soon because the format is dodgy, or can highlight the power of the voices and stories.
Once some of your collection is digitised, you can turn to stage 2 cataloguing – describing the content of the audio, which is what your potential users will need in order to discover or understand it.
What use looks like will depend greatly on your own organisation’s setup. Maybe you could provide access to your digitised sounds on a PC in your search room. Perhaps you could deliver mp3s on a tablet. Your use statistics for whole interviews will be way lower than curated snippets in exhibitions or on websites. Can you illustrate it or transcribe it to make it into a video? People love videos. Can you work with local musicians to make new music out of archive samples, or in response to sound archives? Can you introduce your collections in a simple podcast? Can you plonk clips on a map to take people on a tour?
That’s the end of the poster. But I couldn’t help adding another -ISE. It’s not catchy, or short, but it is really important.
Yes, you need to do all the logistical stuff above. But what will really grab your funder is what the audio *means* to the people who can listen to the digitised audio, now and in the future.
Big thanks to Alex Miller of Lancashire Archives and Alison Gill at Archives+ for organising the event.