Renewing Cultural Resources and Sustaining J.H. Kwabena Nketia's Vision for an African Music Archive in Ghana

This article examines the processes through which the J.H. Kwabena Nketia Archives has struggled to build a sustainable model for audio-visual archiving within an African university and looks to how its contents may serve future students and scholars in an effort to locate African cultural materials and knowledge production in Africa. The archive, operated within the University of Ghana’s Institute of African Studies, was named in honor of Professor Nketia in 2015 and is the realization of over six decades of gathering audio and visual data, acquiring new collections, conducting research, and preservation efforts. The core collection of quarter-inch reels were recorded by Nketia in the early decades of his extensive career shaping Ghana’s cultural policy, building teaching and research institutions, and studying music, culture, and language in Africa. As a part of the University of Ghana, the Nketia Archives provide a valuable resource for local students and scholars and creates a site in which broader conversations about the country’s cultural legacies are brought into the socio-political discourse. The archive is also a resource for housing and making available new acquisitions including over 300 recently digitized recordings of Ghanaian popular music from professor John Collins’ Bokoor African Popular Music Archives Foundation (BAPMAF). With ongoing challenges in accessibility, the Nketia Archives provides a valuable case study for how an African audio-visual archive is created and sustained.

Quality Control for Media Digitization Projects

This article defines types of quality control and explores risk management strategies that are broadly applicable to any organization engaged in media digitization for long-term preservation. It uses the quality control system for audio and video digitization that was developed by Indiana University’s Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative to provide examples and illustrations of these ideas.

Review of Moving Image and Sound Collections for Archivists.

Book review of Moving Image and Sound Collections for Archivists. By Anthony Cocciolo. Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2017. 218 pp. Softcover. ISBN: 978-0-931828-93-5

Sound Mapping as a Tool for Sharing Sonic Cultures

The Islamic call to prayer, the adhan, azhan, or athan, is recited five times daily as a way of signifying prayer times to Muslims. Over the past 7 years I have been involved in a research project of collecting field recordings of the call to prayer from mosques around the world and using a web-based sound map to geo-locate, share these recordings, and reach contributors outside of my own network. In this paper, I will offer a perspective of how the sound map as tool can participate in a discourse on the accessibility of archival materials to broader audiences, as well as the collection of archival materials from broader audiences. The paper will also consider that there may be an inverse relationship between accessibility of materials and archival standards and will look at how this impacts the breadth of accessibility versus the temporality of accessibility. What are the benefits and pitfalls of sharing compressed formats of archival recording through sound maps and widely accessible streaming services, that allow for broader dissemination, searchability, and access, and does this impact our understanding of the role of the archive? What can a sound map offer in connecting users, materials, and communities and how can we leverage such a form of digital media toward archival ends? And finally, in a time when there are communities and people who are disappearing across the globe due to conflicts, how can tools like the sound map help us to archive and document these places.

To Normalise or To Manage the Multitude?

This article discusses the preparation of workflows and output specifications for a transfer project of a collection of DV-based video cassettes (DV, DVCAM, DVCPRO), by VIAA, the Flemish Institute for Archiving. Two hard to predict characteristics of the collection determined the implementation of this project: the quality of the signal (the extent to which signal loss had occurred on the cassettes) and the precise technical characteristics of the recordings. Given these unknown factors, three major decisions had to be made for these cassettes, all of which together determined the work of an external transfer service provider: 1) the necessary steps in the workflow, 2) the output used of the player(s) and 3) the desired output format(s). In making these decisions, the confrontation between two good practices from the audiovisual archive world was crucial: on the one hand, keeping the technical characteristics of the source signal unaffected and, on the other hand, limiting the number of file formats of master files in the archive, in order to increase file format manageability. This article first outlines the project and its mission and further on discusses and arguments the technical choices made, thus culminating in a proposal for a workflow for the transfer of the cassettes.

Microservices in Audiovisual Archives

This document describes and examines strategies for designing lightweight microservice environments for the processing of digital, file-based, audiovisual data within an archive. The document presumes an overview understanding of the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS). The document also makes references to programming archival routines in command languages, but seeks to provide examples in pseudo-code rather than favoring any particular computer language. Since the document intends to focus on archival routines for audiovisual content, an introduction to ffmpeg can be helpful. Additionally, this document does not intend to purport to be a standard for the design of audiovisual microservices but seeks to contribute to and build upon the work and dialogue of many audiovisual archives that has been exploring and successfully implementing microservices in audiovisual archives; see in particularly the compiled, collaborative documentation at https://github.com/amiaopensource/open-workflows.

Degralescence, Prince Codec, and the Kingdom of Media

Once upon a time, a king and queen ruled the kingdom of Media. Media was a peaceful land that was home to all things audio and video. Its subjects lived happy analog lives where preservation, access, and the means of production all revolved around their physical forms. But the king and queen had felt the winds of change blowing across their lands. They had heard tell of an unspeakable evil lurking about their borders. And they knew that the old ways could hold fast no longer.

Tribute: Claes Cnattingius

Claes Cnattingius, honorary member of IASA, died in Stockholm on March 6, 2018.

Musings on the Importance of Harnessing the Power of the Internet to Improve Access to Soundtracks

In the last century, information creation has exploded; more books, newspapers, magazines than ever before; radio shows, recorded music, movies, TV shows, continuous live news, user generated web content, 3D, virtual reality, games, hybrid media types mixing genres and recycling older data, and the list goes on and on. With the digital revolution, this phenomenon of information creation, mixing, recycling, and sharing is ever expanding. Because of the power of the Internet, it has never been so easy to create, save, and share information that will seemingly last forever.