Mark I believe you are being a bit too modest. I have visited the  
AIATSIS facility twice with a few years between the visits and I have  
to say that AIATSIS has one of the best equipped preservation  
facilities considering the size and age of the collection in the  
world. Not only do they have the equipment, but they have trained  
staff and they actually get work done... no kidding. It is a model  
facility in many ways with all gears turning. Somehow even management  
has been able to work with staff and facility and it ALL seems to  
work. A model. AIATSIS is extremely well funded compared to virtually  
any archive of its size that I have ever seen, and they are focusing  
on preservation and access with resources, skill, and dedication.

I was extremely impressed on my visits there. While everyone can use  
additional "help", I have to say that this group is in a far better  
position to give it then almost any place I have seen anywhere. In  
some ways - they could be a model for others to follow in many other  
places around the world. In terms of what they have done with the  
money they have received - they should share that knowledge with  
others, because they have been very efficient and actually turned the  
money into functioning preservation and access as opposed to lots of  
consulting reports and cold vaults.

Perhaps I may as well say here and now that I differ in my assessment  
of the general "window of opportunity" given for digitization and  
remastering of these types of materials. It may be because I have  
visited far more vaults and collections then most or it may be because  
I have been involved in more projects then most. Perhaps it is some  
recent personal events in particular that encourage me to be more  
outspoken then usual, but I find that this general 15 to 30 year time  
period given is just long enough to encourage even more  
procrastination. 15 to 30 years from now - well that is just long  
enough for the new incoming archivists to consider - well 30 years  
from now I will be retiring just like my boss, guess this will fall to  
the next person after all - not me. I have tired of seeing  
"preservation" in the form of turning money into cold vaults without  
those who should have been responsible seeing the obvious outcome of  
having lots of cold tape and nothing to play it on and no one who  
knows how to even if you did.

The irresponsibility has been incomprehensible. Cold vaults as the  
"solution" as opposed to a very temporary way station in a process. It  
is now largely too late - and no one really wants to deal with it.

Very few seem to grasp or acknowledge that the content that was made  
by hundreds of thousands of machines by millions of people, over  
decades of time, simply can not be remastered by a handful of people,  
largely academics, interns, and hobbyists using a paltry amount of  
unsupportable decks hooked up to absurdly overpriced DAW's and  
spending hours of time tweaking the single result so it is "just  
right" - as if there were only 5 more to do that year.... in 15 to 30  
years. The same 15 to 30 years that we were saying 15 to 30 years ago  
- I know because I was there.  It doesn't work. It never worked and it  
never will work.

No matter how well intentioned the scale of the project is simply far  
too large. In a recent project I supervised in Puerto Rico we got a  
NEH grant to digitize about 5000 hours of radio content. It took a  
couple of years, a couple of hundred thousand dollars, and it got done  
- and these tapes were in very bad shape. The shock for me was that we  
could not fine a single - not one - young person (under 30) who before  
the project even knew what a 1/4" audio tape or tape recorder was - no  
less know how to run one. Sure they knew how to run a DAW and station  
automation systems, but not one had any experience with Analog tape.  
Why would they?

Did we teach them? Sure. But there are no jobs for them now, and I  
doubt that they will be able to use that knowledge again anywhere.  
They have all moved on to jobs in digital environments.There were much  
bigger issues that we ran up against. How do you train someone doing  
this work to recognize the difference between line hum that was  
"expected" in the recording and line hum that is a problem? How do you  
train the operators who are doing this work to recognize Analog print  
through when they do not really even understand the concept of analog  
noise in a digital recording? Azimuth problems in the audio when you  
have only heard MP3? The problems are really much deeper then there  
not being any Studer parts around any more. There are layers of issues  
that are largely ignored, because as Al Gore might say - it is an  
inconvenient truth.

The reality that no one wants to face, is that the scale of the  
generation and collection of these materials was so much larger in  
scale that the approaches being taken now to digitize them as to make  
the process totally and completely impossible. Instead of  
concentrating on chilling we need to concentrate on digitizing on  
massive scales, and that isnt going to happen using single $80,000  
quadrega workstations with single Studer decks in academic labs with  
an audio engineer and 2 college interns. The window has largely  
closed. A few may survive - but the window has closed for almost all.

So now, considering this concept. What precisely do we choose to do?  
Do we continue to try to save "everything" which in my opinion is  
clear folly - or do we develop some other selection tools and  
methodology and get to work on an entirely different scale then we  
have before? Do we raise the white flag and say - ok lets get real -  
there are far more of them then us, so we need a different approach.  
Let's no longer whimper about 100,000 hours of everything in one  
collection to save. AIATSIS may be able to do that, but they are but a  
grain of sand. The issue is trying to save 100,000 hours out of the  
100 million that will not make it.



Jim Lindner

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On Oct 29, 2009, at 9:39 PM, Mark Campbell wrote:

> AIATSIS