True archiving these days means the highest quality files you can
make, on hard drives, regularly migrated to new media before they
die, and at least three copies in separate locations... It is
intensive and detailed, not just put it on the shelf and hope.
There are also archival quality gold DVDs and CDs.
Look at this:
<http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/prjplan.html>
and see that there is a whole lot more than where you store the file,
drives, and media!
and this:
<http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/>
I'm on an archivsts e-list but mostly they talk about their old
record collections, maybe 1% about digital preservation. Part of my
work is transferring analog tape to digital but long term
preservation is not a significant part of it to me, that is up to the
clients.
Perhaps the ASmerican Folklife collection would have nature sounds?
Anybody here know nore about that?
Nobody I have heard of specifies the sound level relative to the
didital level, just where 0VU falls on the dBFS scale, generally -20
to -12 dBFS =3D 0 VU or +4.
<L>
On Aug 6, 2008, at 5:18 AM, losangelesprofessor wrote:
How do you archive and preserve sound files? Calibrate for the long
term?
Mine are .wav files. I save them on DVDs or CDs as .wav files. I
figure that in 50 years, such LPCM files should still be readable. Is
this true? (Now vinyl or even shellac had the advantage that all they
demand is something that could discern the "bumps", but of course such
records could literally break.) I also store the files, elsewhere, on
an external hard drive.
Does anyone know what the Library of Congress does?
The second problem is calibration for sound levels. I can indicate
-20dB FS =3D 96 dB SPL. I could also record a 1000 cycle tone at a
particular dB SPL and tell people that their system should reproduce
it at say 84dB.
What do you do?
Thanks to all.
Martin Krieger
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