Peabody, MSE to digitize music tapes

The Johns Hopkins Libraries have begun a project to digitize the audio tape collection of the Peabody Institute Archives with a grant of $230,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

As part of the two-year "Peabody Digital Audio Archives Project," technology specialists at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library will design a new workflow management system to accelerate the process of digitization and minimize its costs, according to Golam Sayeed Choudhury, head of the Digital Knowledge Center.

"What we're trying to do is create a work flow management system to make [digitization] easier for others and lower [its] cost," said Choudhury.

The project will digitize the Peabody Institute's estimated 10,000 audio tapes to ensure their preservation and to broaden their availability with online access, said Elizabeth Schaaf, the Peabody Institute archiver.

Dating as far back as the 1930s, the archives feature recordings of concerts at the Peabody Institute, with musicians ranging from Peabody undergraduates to James Levine, the conductor for the Metropolitan Opera.

"Anybody who's anybody came here to perform and to lecture, so it's a staggering collection," said Schaaf.

Since the current process of digitization is both costly and labor intensive, Choudhury said digitization is not common for most music libraries. The new approach developed by the MSE technology specialists will cut the labor required and reduce cost to make digitization more widespread.

"This is part of the purpose of the project," he said. "We want other places to do this as well."

Whereas the normal digitization process involves copying one tape at a time, the system Choudhury plans to develop will create a server that oversees tape recording.

"The server may process [the music] so you can do more than one project at a time," said Choudhury.

Using an eight-chart analog-to-digital converter, the newly developed system will process four tapes at a time, said Choudhury, with each tape averaging about 30 to 40 minutes.

"The software we're going to develop is what will manage the project," said Choudhury. It will even check the accuracy of the music recordings to ensure the absence of flaws.

In view of the deteriorating quality of the analogue tapes, the project also serves to preserve the music recordings.

"The big push right now is preservation," said Schaaf. "When you have a large collection of analogue tapes, there really are serious preservation issues."

Before the music is digitized, Schaaf said all tapes will be reformatted to provide extra copies, but the quality of the tapes will not be altered.

"Most of our tapes have been kept in a fairly sophisticated storage facility," said Schaaf. "[In estimating the tape quality], you're basically counting on the quality of a manufactured product."

The archives are currently available to the public by special request, according to Schaaf, but Internet availability will offer increased access.

The grant was awarded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal grant-making agency in Washington, D.C., that fosters innovation by supporting museums and libraries.

"Here's a huge amount of contemporary music that will be available," said Schaaf. "These are works that are very rarely recorded so there's a real treasure trove here that just is not accessible elsewhere.