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Feb

2014

EIAJ ½ inch Video Tape Transfers – Working with Community Groups to Develop Digitisation Projects

We understand that when organisations decide to digitise magnetic tape collections the whole process can take significant amounts of time. From initial condition appraisals, to selecting which items to digitise, many questions, as well as technical and cultural factors, have to be taken into account before a digital transfer can take place.

This is further complicated by that fact that money is not readily available for larger digitisation projects and specific funding has to be sought. Often an evidence base has to be collected to present to potential funders about the value and importance of a collection, and this involves working with organisations who have specific expertise in transferring tape-based collections to digital formats to gain vital advice and support.

We are very happy to work with organisations and institutions during this crucial period of collection assessment and bid development. We understand that even during the pre-application stage informed decisions need to be made about the conditions of tape, and realistic anticipations of what treatments may be required during a particular digitisation project. We are very willing to offer the support and advice that will hopefully contribute to the development of a successful bid.

For example, we recently were contacted by Ken Turner who was involved in Action Space, an experimental, community theatre group established in 1968. Ken has a collection of nearly 40 EIAJ SONY video tapes that were made in the 1980s. Because of the nature of the tapes, which almost always require treatment before they can be played back, transferring the whole collection will be fairly expensive so funding will be necessary to make the project happen. We have offered to do a free assessment of the tapes and provide a ten minute sample of the transfer that can be used as part of an evidence base for a funding bid.

Potential Problems with EIAJ ½ Video Tapes

The EIAJ video tape recorder was developed in the late 1960s and is a fairly important format in the history of recordable media. As the first standardized video tape machine, it could playback tapes made by different companies and therefore made video use far cheaper and more widespread, particularly within a domestic context. The EIAJ standard had a similar democratising impact on non-professional video recording due to its portability, low cost, and versatility.As mentioned above, the EIAJ tapes almost always require treatment before they can be played back, particularly the SONY V30-H and V60-H tapes. Problems with the tape are indicated by squealing and shedding upon playback. This is an example of what the AV Artifact Atlas describe as stiction, ‘when media suffering from hydrolysis or contamination is restricted from moving through the tape path correctly.’ When stiction occurs the tape needs to be removed from the transport and treated immediately, either through baking and cleaning, before the transfer can be completed.

EIAJ tapes that have a polyethylene terephthalate ‘back coating’ or ‘substrate’ may also be affected by temperature or humidity changes in its storage environment. These may have caused the tape pack to expand or contract, therefore resulting in permanent distortion of the tape backing. Such problems are exacerbated by the helical scan method of recording which is common to video tape, which records parallel tracks that run diagonally across the tape from one edge to the other. If the angle that the recorded tracks make to the edge of the tape do not correspond with the scan angle of the head (which always remains fixed), mistracking and information loss can occur, which can lead to tracking errors. Correcting tracking errors is fairly easy as most machines have in-built tracking controls. Some of the earliest SONY CV ½ inch video tape machines didn’t have this function however, so this presents serious problems for the migration of these tapes if their back coating has suffered deformation.

The possibility of collaboration

We are excited about the possibility of working with the Action Space collection, mainly because we would love to opportunity to learn more about their work. Like many other theatre groups who were established in the late 1960s, Action Space wanted to challenge the elitism of art and make it accessible to everyone in the community. In their 1972 annual report, which is archived on the Unfinished Histories: Recording the History of Alternative Theatre website, they describe the purposes of the company as follows:

‘Its workings are necessarily experimental, devious, ambiguous, and always changing in order to find a new situation. In the short term the objectives are to continually question and demonstrate through the actions of all kinds new relationships between artists and public, teachers and taught, drop-outs and society, performers and audiences, and to question current attitudes of the possibility of creativity for everyone. For the longer term the aim is to place the artists in a non-elite set up, to keep “normal” under revision, to break barriers in communication and to recognise that education is a continuing process.’

Although Action Space disbanded in 1981, the project was relaunched in the same year as Action Space Mobile, who are still operating today. The centre of the Action Space Mobile’s philosophy is that they are an arts company ‘that has always worked with people, believing that contact and participation in the arts can change lives positively.’ There is also the London based ActionSpace, who work with artists with learning disabilities.

We hope that offering community heritage projects the possibility of collaboration will help them to benefit from our knowledge and experience. In turn we will have interesting things to watch and listen to, which is part of what makes working in the digitisation world fun and enjoyable.

Feb

2014

reel to reel audio tape restoration and digitising of Manchester Oi! band State Victims

Often the tapes we receive to digitise are ‘forgotten’ recordings. Buried under a pile of stuff in a dark, cold room, their owners think they are lost forever. Then, one day, a reel of the mysterious tape emerges from the shadows generating feelings of excitement and anticipation. What is stored on tape? Is the material in a playable condition? What will happen to the tape once it is in a digital format?

All of these things happened recently when Paul Travis sent us a ¼ inch AMPEX tape of the band he played in with his brother, the Salford Oi! punk outfit State Victims. The impetus for forming State Victims emerged when the two brothers ‘split from Salford bands, Terrorist Guitars and the Bouncing Czechs respectively, and were looking for a new musical vessel to express and reassert their DIY music ethic, but in a more vital and relevant way, searching for a new form of “working-class protest.”‘

The tape had been in the wilderness for the past 30 years, residing quietly in a shed in rural Cambridgeshire. It was in fairly good condition, displaying no signs of damage such as mould on the tape or spool. Like many of the AMPEX tapes we receive it did need some baking treatment because it was suffering from binder hydrolysis (a.k.a. Sticky Shed Syndrome). The baking, conducted at 49 Celsius for 8 hours in our customised oven, was successful and the transfer was completed without any problems. We created a high resolution stereo 24 bit/ 96 kHz WAV file which is recommended for archived audio, as well as a MP3 access copy that can be easily shared online.

Image of tape post-transfer. When it arrived the tape was not wound on neatly and there was no leder tape on it.

Finding old tapes and sending them to be digitised can be a process of discovery. Originally Paul thought the tape was of a 1983 session recorded at the Out of the Blue Studios in Ancoats, Manchester, but it became apparent that the tape was of an earlier recording. Soon after we digitised the first recording we received a message from Paul saying another State Victims tape had ‘popped up in an attic’, so it is amazing what you find when you start digging around!

Like many other bands connected to the Manchester area, the digital artefacts of State Victims are stored on the Manchester District Music Archive (MDMA), a user-led online archive established in 2003 in order to celebrate Greater Manchester music and its history. The MDMA is part of a wider trend of do it yourself archival activity that exploded in the 21st century due to the availability of cheap digital technologies. In what is arguably a unique archival moment, digital technologies have enabled marginal, subcultural and non/ anti-commercial music to widely circulate alongside the more conventional, commercial artefacts of popular music. This is reflected in the MDMA where the artefacts of famous Manchester bands such as The Smiths, The Fall, Oasis and Joy Division sit alongside the significantly less famous archives of the Manchester Musicians Collective, The Paranoids, Something Shady and many others.

Within the community-curated space of the MDMA all of the artefacts acquire a similar value, derived from their ability to illuminate the social history of the area told through its music. Much lip service has been paid to the potential of Web 2.0 technologies and social media to enable new forms of collaboration and ‘user-participation’, but involving people in the construction of web-based content is not always an automatic process. If you build it, people do not always come. As a user-led resource, however, the MDMA seems pretty effective. It is inviting to use, well organised and a wide range of people are clearly contributing, which is reflected in the vibrancy of its content. It is exciting that such an online depository exists, providing a new home for the errant tape, freshly digitised, that is part of Manchester’s music history.

Feb

2014

Open Source Solutions for Digital Preservation

In a technological world that is rapidly changing how can digital information remain accessible?

One answer to this question lies in the use of open source technologies. As a digital preservation strategy it makes little sense to use codecs owned by Mac or Windows to save data in the long term. Propriety software essentially operate like closed systems and risk compromising access to data in years to come.

It is vital, therefore, that the digitisation work we do at Great Bear is done within the wider context of digital preservation. This means making informed decisions about the hardware and software we use to migrate your tape-based media into digital formats. We use a mixture of propriety and open source software, simply because it makes our a bit life easier. Customers also ask us to deliver their files in propriety formats. For example, Apple pro res is a really popular codec that doesn’t take up a lot of data space so our customers often request this, and of course we are happy to provide it.

Using open systems definitely has benefits. The flexibility of Linux, for example, enables us to customise our digitisation system according to what we need to do. As with the rest of our work, we are keen to find ways to keep using old technologies if they work well, rather than simply throwing things away when shiny new devices come on the market. There is the misconception that to ingest vast amounts of audio data you need the latest hardware. All you need in fact is a big hard drive, flexible, yet reliable, software and an operating system that doesn’t crash so it can be left to ingest for 8 hours or more. Simple! Examples of open source software we use is the sound processing programme SoX. This saves us a lot of time because we are able to write scripts for the programme that can be used to batch process audio data according to project specifications.

Openness in the digital preservation world

Within the wider digital preservation world open source technologies are also used widely. From digital preservation tools developed by projects such as SCAPE and the Open Planets Foundation, there are plenty of software resources available for individuals and organisations who need to manage their digital assets. It would be naïve, however, to assume that the practice of openness here, and in other realms of the information economy, are born from the same techno-utopian impulse that propelled the open software movement from the 1970s onwards. The SCAPE website makes it clear that the development of open source information preservation tools are ‘the best approach given the substantial public investment made at the European and national levels, and because it is the most effective way to encourage commercial growth.’

What would make projects like SCAPE and Open Planets even better is if they thought about ways to engage non-specialist users who may be curious about digital preservation tools but have little experience of navigating complex software. The tools may well be open, but the knowledge of how to use them are not.

Openness, as a means of widening access to technical skills and knowledge, is the impulse behind the AV Artifact Atlas (AVAA), an initiative developed in conjunction with the community media archive project Bay Area Video Coalition. In a recent interview on the Library of Congress’ Digital Preservation Blog, Hannah Frost, Digital Library Services Manager at Stanford Libraries and Manager, Stanford Media Preservation Lab explains the idea behind the AVAA.

‘The problem is most archivists, curators and conservators involved in media reformatting are ill-equipped to detect artifacts, or further still to understand their cause and ensure a high quality job. They typically don’t have deep training or practical experience working with legacy media. After all, why should we? This knowledge is by and large the expertise of video and audio engineers and is increasingly rare as the analogue generation ages, retires and passes on. Over the years, engineers sometimes have used different words or imprecise language to describe the same thing, making the technical terminology even more intimidating or inaccessible to the uninitiated. We need a way capture and codify this information into something broadly useful. Preserving archival audiovisual media is a major challenge facing libraries, archives and museums today and it will challenge us for some time. We need all the legs up we can get.’

The promise of openness can be a fraught terrain. In some respects we are caught between a hyper-networked reality, where ideas, information and tools are shared openly at a lightning pace. There is the expectation that we can have whatever we want, when we want it, which is usually now. On the other side of openness are questions of ownership and regulation – who controls information, and to what ends?

Perhaps the emphasis placed on the value of information within this context will ultimately benefit digital archives, because there will be significant investment, as there already has been, in the development of open resources that will help to take care of digital information in the long term.

Feb

2014

Early digital tape recordings on PCM/ U-matic and Betamax video tape

We are now used to living in a born-digital environment, but the transition from analogue to digital technologies did not happen overnight. In the late 1970s, early digital audio recordings were made possible by a hybrid analogue/digital system. It was composed by the humble transport and recording mechanisms of the video tape machine, and a not so humble PCM (pulse-code-modulation) digital processor. Together they created the first two-channel stereo digital recording system.

The first professional use digital processing machine, made by SONY, was the PCM 1600. It was introduced in 1978 and used a U-matic tape machine. Later models, the PCM 1610/ 1630, acted as the first standard for mastering audio CDs in the 1980s. SONY employee Toshitada Doi, whose impressive CV includes the development of the PCM adaptor, the Compact Disc and the CIRC error correction system, visited recording studios around the world in an effort to facilitate the professional adoption of PCM digital technologies. He was not however welcomed with open arms, as the SONY corp. website explains:

'Studio engineers were opposed to digital technology. They criticized digital technology on the grounds that it was more expensive than analogue technology and that it did not sound as soft or musical. Some people in the recording industry actually formed a group called MAD (Musicians Against Digital), and they declared their position to the Audio Engineering Society (AES).'

Several consumer/ semi-professional models were marketed by SONY in the 70s and 80s, starting with the PCM-1 (1977). In a retro-review of the PCM-F10 (1981), Dr Frederick J. Bashour explains that

'older model VCRs often worked better than newer ones since the digital signal, as seen by the VCR, was a monochrome pattern of bars and dots; the presence of modern colour tweaking and image compensation circuits often reduced the recording system's reliability and, if possible, were turned off.'

Why did the evolution of an emerging digital technology stand on the shoulders of what had, by 1981, become a relatively mature analogue technology? It all comes down to the issue of bandwidth. A high quality PCM audio recording required 1-1.5 MHz bandwidth, which is far greater than a conventional analogue audio signal (15-20KHz). While this bandwidth was beyond the scope of analogue recording technology of the time, video tape recorders did have the capacity to record signals with higher bandwidths.

If you have ever wondered where the 16 bit/ 44 Khz sampling standard for the CD came from, it was because in the early 1980s, when the CD standard was agreed, there was no other practical way of storing digital sound than by a PCM Converter & video recorder combination. As the wikipedia entry for the PCM adaptor explains, 'the sampling frequencies of 44.1 and 44.056 kHz were thus the result of a need for compatibility with the 25-frame (CCIR 625/50 countries) and 30-frame black and white (EIAN 525/60 countries) video formats used for audio storage at the time.' The sampling rate was adopted as the standard for CDs and, unlike many other things in our rapidly changing technological world, it hasn't changed since.

The fusion of digital and analogue technologies did not last long, and the introduction of DAT tapes in 1987 rendered the PCM digital converters/ video tape system largely obsolete. DAT recorders basically did the same job as PCM/ video but came in one, significantly smaller, machine. DAT machines had the added advantage of being able to accept multiple sampling rates (the standard 44.1 kHz, as well as 48kHz, and 32kHz, all at 16 bits per sample, and a special LP recording mode using 12 bits per sample at 32 kHz for extended recording time).

Problems with migrating early digital tape recordings

There will always be the risk with any kind of magnetic tape recordings that there won't be enough working tape machines to playback the material recorded on them in the future. As spare parts become harder to source, tapes with worn out transport mechanisms will simply become inoperable. We are not quite at this stage yet, and at Greatbear we have plenty of working U-matic, Betamax and VHS machines so don't worry too much! Machine obsolescence is however a real threat facing tape-based archives.

Such a problem comes into sharp relief when we consider the case of digital audio recordings made on analogue video tape machines. Audio recordings 'work' the tape transport in a far more vigorous fashion than your average domestic video tape user. It may be rewound and fast-forwarded more often, and in a professional environment may be in constant use, thus leading to greater wear and tear.

Those who chose to adopt digital early and made recordings on tape will have marvelled at the lovely clean recordings and the wonders of error correction technology. As a legacy format however, tape-based digital recordings are arguably more at risk than their analogue counterparts. They are doubly compromised by fragility of tape, and the particular problems that befall digital technologies when things go wrong.

'Edge damage' is very common in video tape and can happen when the tape transport becomes worn. This can alter the alignments of transport mechanism, leading it to move move up and down and crush the tape. As you can see in this photograph the edge of this tape has become damaged.

Because it is a digital recording, this has led to substantial problems with the transfer, namely that large sections of the recording simply 'drop out.' In instances such as these, where the tape itself has been damaged, analogue recordings on tape are infinitely more recoverable than digital ones. Dr W.C. John Van Bogart explains that

'even in instances of severe tape degradation, where sound or video quality is severely compromised by tape squealing or a high rate of dropouts, some portion of the original recording will still be perceptible. A digitally recorded tape will show little, if any, deterioration in quality up to the time of catastrophic failure when large sections of recorded information will be completely missing. None of the original material will be detectable in these missing sections.'

This risk of catastrophic, as opposed to gradual loss of information on tape based digital media, is what makes these recordings particularly fragile and at risk. What is particularly worrying about digital tape recordings is they may not show any external signs of damage until it is too late. We therefore encourage individuals, recording studios and memory institutions to assess the condition of their digital tape collections and take prompt action if the recorded information is valuable.

The story of PCM digital processors and analogue tapes gives us a fascinating window into a time when we were not quite analogue, but not quite digital either, demonstrating how technologies co-evolve using the capacities of what is available in order to create something new.

For our PCM audio on video tape transfer services please follow this link: greatbear - PCM audio on video tape

Jan

2014

Digital Optical Technology System – ‘A non-magnetic, 100 year, green solution for data storage.’

‘A non-magnetic, 100 year, green solution for data storage.’

This is the stuff of digital information managers’ dreams. No more worrying about active data management, file obsolescence or that escalating energy bill.

Imagine how simple life would be if there was a way to store digital information that could last, without intervention, for nearly 100 years. Those precious digital archives could be stored in a warehouse that was not climate controlled, because the storage medium was resilient enough to withstand irregular temperatures.

Imagine after 100 years an archivist enters that very same warehouse to retrieve information requested by a researcher. The archivist pulls a box off the shelf and places it on the table. In their bag they have a powerful magnifying glass which they use to read the information. Having ascertained they have the correct item, they walk out the warehouse, taking the box with them. Later that day, instructions provided as part of the product licensing over 100 years ago are used to construct a reader that will retrieve the data. The information is recovered and, having assessed the condition of the storage medium which seems in pretty good nick, the digital optical technology storage is taken back to the warehouse where it sits for another 10 years, until it is subject to its life-cycle review.

Does this all sound too good to be true? For anyone exposed to the constantly changing world of digital preservation, the answer would almost definitely be yes. We have already covered on this blog numerous issues that the contemporary digital information manager may face. The lack of standardisation in technical practices and the bewildering array of theories about how to manage digital data mean there is currently no ‘one size fits all’ solution to tame the archive of born-digital and digitised content, which is estimated to swell to 3,000 Exabytes (thousands of petabytes) by 2020*. We have also covered the growing concerns about the ecological impact of digital technologies, such as e-waste and energy over-consumption. With this in mind, the news that a current technology exists that can by-pass many of these problems will seem like manna from heaven. What can this technology be and why have you never heard about it?

The technology in question is called DOTS, which stands for Digital Optical Technology System. The technology is owned and being developed by Group 47, who ‘formed in 2008 in order to secure the patents, designs, and manufacturing processes for DOTS, a proven 100-year archival technology developed by the Eastman Kodak Company.’ DOTS is refreshingly different from every other data storage solution on the market because it ‘eliminates media and energy waste from forced migration, costly power requirements, and rigid environmental control demands’. What’s more, DOTS are ‘designed to be “plug & play compatible” with the existing Linear Tape Open (LTO) tape-based archiving systems & workﬂow’.

In comparison with other digital information management systems that can employ complex software, the data imaged by DOTS does not use sophisticated technology. John Lafferty writes that at ‘the heart of DOTS technology is an extremely stable storage medium – metal alloy sputtered onto mylar tape – that undergoes a change in reflectivity when hit by a laser. The change is irreversible and doesn’t alter over time, making it a very simple yet reliable technology.’

DOTS can survive the benign neglect all data experiences over time, but can also withstand pretty extreme neglect. During research and development, for example, DOTS was exposed to a series of accelerated environmental age testing that concluded ‘there was no discernible damage to the media after the equivalent of 95.7 years.’ But the testing did not stop there. Since acquiring patents for the technology Group 47,

‘has subjected samples of DOTS media to over 72 hours of immersion each in water, benzine, isopropyl alcohol, and Clorox (™) Toilet Bowl Cleaner. In each case, there was no detectable damage to the DOTS media. However, when subjected to the citric acid of Sprite carbonated beverage, the metal had visibly deteriorated within six hours.’

Robust indeed! DOTS is also non-magnetic, chemically inert, immune from electromagnetic fields and can be stored in normal office environments or extremes ranging from -9º – 65º C. It ticks all the boxes really.

DOTS vs the (digital preservation) world

The only discernible benefit of the ‘open all hours’, random access digital information culture over a storage solution such as DOTS is accessibility. While it certainly is amazing how quick and easy it is to retrieve valuable data at the click of a button, it perhaps should not be the priority when we are planning how to best take care of the information we create, and are custodians of. The key words here are valuable data. Emerging norms in digital preservation, which emphasise the need to always be responsive to technological change, takes gambles with the very digital information it seeks to preserve because there is always a risk that migration will compromise the integrity of data.

The constant management of digital data is also costly, disruptive and time-consuming. In the realm of cultural heritage, where organisations are inevitably under resourced, making sure your digital archives are working and accessible can sap energy and morale. These issues of course affect commercial organisations too. The truth is the world is facing an information epidemic, and surely we would all rest easier if we knew our archives were safe and secure. Indeed, it seems counter-intuitive that amid the endless flashy devices and research expertise in the world today, we are yet to establish sustainable archival solutions for digital data.

Of course, using a technology like DOTS need not mean we abandon the culture of access enabled by file-based digital technologies. It may however mean that the digital collections available on instant recall are more carefully curated. Ultimately we have to ask if privileging the instant access of information is preferable to long-term considerations that will safeguard cultural heritage and our planetary resources.

If such a consideration errs on the side of moderation and care, technology’s role in shaping that hazy zone of expectancy known as ‘the future’ needs to shift from the ‘bigger, faster, quicker, newer’ model, to a more cautious appreciation of the long-term. Such an outlook is built-in to the DOTS technology, demonstrating that to be ‘future proof’ a technology need not only withstand environmental challenges, such as flooding or extreme temperature change, but must also be ‘innovation proof’ by being immune to the development of new technologies. As John Lafferty writes, the license bought with the product ‘would also mandate full backward compatibility to Generation Zero, achievable since readers capable of reading greater data densities should have no trouble reading lower density information.’ DOTS also do not use propriety codecs, as Chris Castaneda reports, ‘the company’s plan is to license the DOTS technology to manufacturers, who would develop and sell it as a non-proprietary system.’ Nor do they require specialist machines to be read. With breathtaking simplicity, ‘data can be recovered with a light and a lens.’

It would be wrong to assume that Group 47’s development of DOTS is not driven by commercial interests – it clearly is. DOTS do however seem to solve many of the real problems that currently afflict the responsible and long-term management of digital information. It will be interesting to see if the technology is adopted and by who. Watch this space!

* According to a 2011 Enterprise Strategy Group Archive TCO Study

Jan

2014

Digital Records of the First World War

Across the world, 2014-2018 will be remembered for its commitment to remembrance. The events being remembered are, of course, those related to the First World War.

What is most intriguing about the centenary of the First World War is that it is already an occasion for growing reflection on how such an event has been remembered, and the way this shapes contemporary perceptions of history.

The UK government has committed over £50 million pounds for commemoration events such as school trips to battlefields, new exhibitions and public ceremonies. If you think that seems like a little bit too much, take a visit to the No Glory in War website, the campaign group who are questioning the purposes of commemorating a war that caused so much devastation.

The concerns raised by No Glory about political appropriation are understandable, particularly if we take into account a recent Daily Mail article written by current Education Secretary Michael Gove. In it Gove stresses that it is

‘important that we commemorate, and learn from, that conflict in the right way in the next four years. […] The war was, of course, an unspeakable tragedy, which robbed this nation of our bravest and best. Our understanding of the war has been overlaid by misunderstandings, and misrepresentations which reflect an, at best, ambiguous attitude to this country and, at worst, an unhappy compulsion on the part of some to denigrate virtues such as patriotism, honour and courage.

The conflict has, for many, been seen through the fictional prism of dramas such as Oh! What a Lovely War, The Monocled Mutineer and Blackadder, as a misbegotten shambles – a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite. Even to this day there are Left-wing academics all too happy to feed those myths.’

Gove clearly understands the political consequences of public remembrance. In his view, popular cultural understanding of the First World War have distorted our knowledge and proper values ‘as a nation’. There is however a ‘right way to remember,’ and this must convey particular images and ideas of the conflict, and Britain’s role within it.

Digitisation and re-interpretation

While the remembrance of the First World War will undoubtedly become, if it has not already, a political struggle over social values, digital archives will play a key role ensuring the debates that take place are complex and well-rounded. Significant archive collections will be digitised and disseminated to wide audiences because of the centenary, leading to re-interpretation and debate.

The BBC are facilitating discussions through features on their significant commemoration site, including an interesting consideration of the enduring influence of poet Wilfred Owen. Jisc and Oxford University have also collaborated to create an Open Educational Resource supporting new directions in teaching the First World War.

If you want a less UK-centric take on remembrance you can visit the Europeana 1914-1918 Website or Centenary News, a not-for-profit organisation that has been set up to provide independent, impartial and international coverage of the Centenary of the First World War.

Other, less ‘curated’ resources, abound online. For example, the Daily Telegraph has digitised every newspaper published between 1914-1918, with each edition being ‘published’ on its centenary date. The British Library’s excellent timeline series include one relating to the First World War. Significant parts of the National Archives’ First World War collections are available to access online, including copies of war diaries, Victoria Cross and service registers for members of the Army, Navy, Airforce and War Nurses. You can also listen to ‘Voices of the Armistice,’ a series of recordings relating to Armistice Day. Similar to the Soldier’s Stories Audio Gallery on the BBC, these recordings are not the oral testimony of soldiers, but actors reading excerpts from their diaries or letters.

Oral Testimonies of the First World War

Large amounts of digitised material about the First World War are paper documents, given that portable recording technologies were not in wide scale use during the years of the conflict.

The first hand oral testimonies of First World War soldiers have usually been recorded several years after the event. What can such oral records tell us that other forms of archival evidence can’t?

Since it became popular in the 1960s and 1970s, oral histories have often been treated with suspicion by some professional historians who have questioned their status as ‘hard evidence’. The Oral History Society website describe however the unique value of oral histories: ‘Everyone forgets things as time goes by and we all remember things in different ways. All memories are a mixture of facts and opinions, and both are important. The way in which people make sense of their lives is valuable historical evidence in itself.’

We were recently sent some oral recordings of Frank Brash, a soldier who had served in the First World War. The tapes, that were recorded in 1975 by Frank’s son Robert, were sent in by his Great-Grandson Andrew who explained how they were made ‘as part of family history, so we could pass them down the generations.’ He goes on to say that ‘Frank died in 1980 at the age of 93, my father died in 2007. Most of the tapes are his recollections of the First World War. He served as a machine gunner in the battles of Messines and Paschendale amongst others. He survived despite a life expectancy for machine gunners of 6 days. He won the Military Medal but we never found out why.’

Excerpt used with kind permission

If you are curious to access the whole interview a transcript has been sent to the Imperial War Museum who also have a significant collection of sound recordings relating to conflicts since 1914.

The recordings themselves included a lot of tape hiss because they were recorded at a low sound level, and were second generation copies of the tapes (so copies of copies).

Our job was to digitise the tapes but reduce the noise so the voices could be heard better. This was a straightforward process because even though they were copies, the tapes were in good condition. The hiss however was often as loud as the voice and required a lot of work post-migration. Fortunately, because the recording was of a male voice, it was possible to reduce the higher frequency noise significantly without affecting the audibility of Frank speaking.

Remembering the interruption

Amid the rush of archive fever surrounding the First World War, it is important to remember how, as a series of events, it arguably changed the conditions of how we remember. It interrupted what Walter Benjamin called ‘communicable experience.’ In his essay ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, Benjamin talks of men who ‘had returned from the battlefield grown silent’, unable to share what had happened to them. The image of the shell-shocked soldier, embodied by fictional characters such as Septimus Smith in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, was emblematic of men whose experience had been radically interrupted. Benjamin went on to write:

‘Never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than the strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse drawn street-car now stood under the empty sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.’

Of course, it cannot be assumed that prior to the Great War all was fine, dandy and uncomplicated in the world. This would be a romantic and false portrayal. But the mechanical force of the Great War, and the way it delayed efforts to speak and remember in the immediate aftermath, also needs to be integrated into contemporary processes of remembrance. How will it be possible to do justice to the memory of the people who took part otherwise?

Jan

2014

Digital Preservation – Establishing Standards and Challenges for 2014

2014 will no doubt present a year of new challenges for those involved in digital preservation. A key issue remains the sustainability of digitisation practices within a world yet to establish firm standards and guidelines. Creating lasting procedures capable of working across varied and international institutions would bring some much needed stability to a profession often characterized by permanent change and innovation.

In 1969 The EIAJ-1 video tape was developed by the Electronic Industries Association of Japan. It was the first standardized format for industrial/non-broadcast video tape recording. Once implemented it enabled video tapes to be played on machines made by different manufacturers and it helped to make video use cheaper and more widespread, particularly within a domestic context.

The introduction of standards in the digitisation world would of course have very little impact on the widespread use of digital technologies which are, in the west, largely ubiquitous. It would however make the business of digital preservation economically more efficient, simply because organisations would not be constantly adapting to change. For example, think of the costs involved in keeping up with rapid waves of technological transformation: updating equipment, migrating data and ensuring file integrity and operability are maintained are a few costly and time consuming examples of what this would entail.

Although increasingly sophisticated digital forensic technology can help to manage some of these processes, highly trained (real life!) people will still be needed to oversee any large-scale preservation project. Within such a context resource allocation will always have to account for these processes of adaptation. It has to be asked then: could this money, time and energy be practically harnessed in other, more efficient ways? The costs of non-standardisation becomes ever more pressing when we consider the amount of the digital data preserved by large institutions such as the British Library, whose digital collection is estimated to amass up to 5 petabytes (5000 terabytes) by 2020. This is not a simple case of updating your iphone to the next model, but an extremely complex and risky venture where the stakes are high. Do we really want to jeopardise rich forms cultural heritage in the name of technological progress?

The US-based National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) National Agenda for Digital Stewardship 2014 echoes such a sentiment. They argue that ‘the need for integration, interoperability, portability, and related standards and protocols stands out as a theme across all of these areas of infrastructure development’ (3). The executive summary also stresses the negative impact rapid technological change can create, and the need to ‘coordinate to develop comprehensive coverage on critical standards bodies, and promote systematic community monitoring of technology changes relevant to digital preservation.’ (2)

File Format Action Plans

One step on the way to more secure standards is the establishment of File Format Action Plans, a practice which is being increasingly recommended by US institutions. The idea behind developing a file format action plan is to create a directory of file types that are in regular use by people in their day to day lives and by institutions. Getting it all down on paper can help us track what may be described as the implicit user-standards of digital culture. This is the basic idea behind Parsimonious Preservation, discussed on the blog last year: that through observing trends in file use we may come to the conclusion that the best preservation policy is to leave data well alone since in practice files don’t seem to change that much, rather than risk the integrity of information via constant intervention.

As Lee Nilsson, who is currently working as a National Digital Stewardship Resident at the US Library of Congress writes, ‘specific file format action plans are not very common’, and when created are often subject to constant revision. Nevertheless he argues that devising action plans can ‘be more than just an “analysis of risk.” It could contain actionable information about software and formats which could be a major resource for the busy data manager.’

Other Preservation Challenges

What are the other main challenges facing ‘digital stewards’ in 2014? In a world of exponential information growth, making decisions about what we keep and what we don’t becomes ever more pressing. When whole collections cannot be preserved digital curators are increasingly called upon to select material deemed representative and relevant. How is it possible to know now what material needs to be preserve for posterity? What values inform our decision making?

To take an example from our work at Great Bear: we often receive tapes from artists who have achieved little or no commercial success in their life times, but whose work is often of great quality and can tell us volumes about a particular community or musical style. How does such work stand up against commercially successful recordings? Which one is more valuable? The music that millions of people bought and enjoyed or the music that no one has ever heard?

Ultimately these questions will come to occupy a central concern for digital stewards of audio data, particularly with the explosion of born-digital music cultures which have enabled communities of informal and often non-commercial music makers to proliferate. How is it possible to know in advance what material will be valuable for people 20, 50 or 100 years from now? These are very difficult, if not impossible questions for large institutions to grapple with, and take responsibility for. Which is why, as members of a digital information management society, it is necessary to empower ourselves with relevant information so we can make considered decisions about our own personal archives.

A final point to stress is that among the ‘areas of concern’ for digital preservation cited by the NDSA, moving image and recorded sound figure highly, alongside other born-digital content such as electronic records, web and social media. Magnetic tape collections remain high risk and it is highly recommended that you migrate this content to a digital format as soon as possible. While digitisation certainly creates many problems as detailed above, magnetic tape is also threatened by physical deterioration and its own obsolescence challenges, in particular finding working machines to play back tape on. The simple truth is, if you want to access material in your tape collections it needs now to be stored in a resilient digital format. We can help, and offer other advice relating to digital information management, so don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Dec

2013

End of year thank yous to our customers

What a year it has been in the life of Greatbear Analogue and Digital Media. As always the material customers have sent us to digitise has been fascinating and diverse, both in terms of the recordings themselves and the technical challenges presented in the transfer process. At the end of a busy year we want to take this opportunity to thank our customers for sending us their valuable tape collections, which over the course of 2013 has amounted to a whopping 900 hours of digitised material.

We feel very honoured to play a part in preserving personal and institutional archives that are often incredibly rare, unique and, more often than not, very entertaining. It is a fairly regular occurrence in the Great Bear Studio to have radio jingles from the 60s, oral histories of war veterans, recordings of family get-togethers and video documentation of avant-garde 1970s art experiments simultaneously migrating in a vibrant melee of digitisation.

Throughout the year we have been transported to a breathtaking array of places and situations via the ‘mysterious little reddish-brown ribbon.’ Spoken word has featured heavily, with highlights including Brian Pimm-Smith‘s recordings of his drive across the Sahara desert, Pilot Officer Edwin Aldridge ‘Finn’ Haddock’s memories of World-War Two, and poet Paul Roche reading his translation of Sophocles’ Antigone.

We have also received a large amount of rare or ‘lost’ audio recordings through which we have encountered unique moments in popular music history. These include live recordings from the Couriers Folk Club in Leicester, demo tapes from artists who achieved niche success like 80s John Peel favourites BOB, and large archives of prolific but unknown songwriters such as the late Jack Hollingshead, who was briefly signed to the Beatles’ Apple label in the 1960s. We always have a steady stream of tapes from Bristol Archive Records, who continue to acquire rare recordings from bands active in the UK’s reggae and post-punk scenes. We have also migrated VHS footage of local band Meet Your Feet from the early 1990s.

On our blog we have delved into the wonderful world of digital preservation and information management, discussing issues such as ‘parsimonious preservation‘ which is advocated by the National Archives, as well as processes such as migration, normalisation and emulation. Our research suggests that there is still no ‘one-size-fits-all’ strategy in place for digital information management, and we will continue to monitor the debates and emerging practices in this field in the coming year. Migrating analogue and digital tapes to digital files remains strongly recommended for access and preservation reasons, with some experts bookmarking 15 April 2023 as the date when obsolescence for many formats will come into full effect.

We have been developing the blog into a source of information and advice for our customers, particularly relating to issues such as copyright and compression/ digital format delivery. We hope you have found it useful!

While the world is facing a growing electronic waste crisis, Great Bear is doing its bit to buck the trend by recycling old domestic and professional tape machines. In 2013 we have acquired over 20 ‘new’ old analogue and digital video machines. This has included early ’70s video cassette domestic machines such as the N1502, up to the most recent obsolete formats such as Digital Betacam. We are always looking for old machines, both working and not working, so do get in touch if your spring clean involves ridding yourself of obsolete tape machines!

Our collection of test equipment is also growing as we acquire more wave form monitors, rare time-based correctors and vectorscopes. In audio preservation we’ve invested heavily in early digital audio machines such as multi-track DTRS and ADAT machines which are rapidly becoming obsolete.

We are very much looking forward to new challenges in 2014 as we help more people migrate their tape-based collections to digital formats. We are particularly keen to develop our work with larger archives and memory institutions, and can offer consultation on technical issues that arise from planning and delivering a large-scale digitisation project, so please do get in touch if you want to benefit from our knowledge and experience.

Once again a big thank you from us at Greatbear, and we hope to hear from you in the new year.

Nov

2013

Paul Roche recordings & preservation challenges with acetate reel-to-reel magnetic tape

We were recently sent a very interesting collection of recordings of the late poet, novelist and acclaimed translator Paul Roche. During his colourful and creative life Roche published two novels, O Pale Gallellean and Vessel of Dishonour, and several poetry collections, and brushed shoulders with some of the 20th century’s most captivating avant-garde artistic and literary figures. His faculty colleague when he worked at Smith College, MA in the late 1950s was none other than Sylvia Plath, who pithily described Roche’s ‘professional dewy blue-eyed look and his commercially gilded and curled blond hair on his erect, dainty bored aristocratic head’.

His intense 30 year friendship with painter Duncan Grant was immortalised in the book With Duncan Grant in Southern Turkey, which documented a holiday the friends took together shortly before Grant’s death. The relationship with Grant has often eclipsed Roche’s own achievements, and he is often mistakenly identified as a member of the Bloomsbury group. Roche also achieved success beyond the literary and scholarly world when his translation of Oedipus the King became the screenplay for the 1968 film starring Christopher Plummer and Orson Welles.

The recordings we were sent were made between 1960-1967 when Roche worked at universities in America. Roche experienced greater professional success in America, and his translations of Ancient Greek are still used in US schools and universities. His son Martin, who sent us the tapes, is planning to use the digitised recordings on a commemorative website that will introduce contemporary audiences to his father’s creative legacy.

The Great Bear Studio has been pleasantly awash today with the sound of Roche reading poetry and his dramatic renditions of Sophocles’ ‘Oedipus the King’, ‘Oedipus at Colonus’ and ‘Antigone’. The readings communicate his emphatic pleasure performing language via the spoken word, and an unique talent to immerse listeners in images, rhythm and phrases.

Listen to Paul Roche reading his translation of ‘Antigone’.

Our own pleasure listening to the recordings has however been disrupted because of frequent snaps in the tape. The tapes are covered in splices, which suggests they had been edited previously. Over time the adhesive glue has dried out, breaking the tape as it moves through the transport. The collection of tapes as a whole are fairly brittle because the base film, which forms the structural integrity of the tape, is made of acetate.

Canadian-based digitisation expert Richard Hess explains that

‘Acetate was the first widely used base film, with Scotch 111 being in production from 1948 through 1972/73, a total of 24-25 years. Acetate tape is generally robust and has the advantage of breaking cleanly rather than stretching substantially prior to breaking when overstressed. Acetate tapes residing in collections are over 30-years-old, with the oldest being over 60-years-old.’

The big downside to acetate is that when it degrades it loses its flexibility and becomes a bit like an extended tape measure. This means it is harder to pass the tape consistently through the tape transport. This is colloquially known in the digitisation world as ‘country-laning’, when the tape changes shape in all dimensions and becomes wiggly, like a country lane. To extend the metaphor, a well functioning tape should be flat, like, one supposes, a motorway.

When a tape is ‘country-laning’ it means tracks of recorded material are moving slightly so they shift in and out of phase, dis-aligning the angle between the tape head(s) and tape, or azimuth. This has a detrimental effect on the quality of the playback because the machine reading the recorded material on the tape is at odds with surface area from which the information is being read.

If you are reading this and wondering if the base film in your tape is made of acetate, or is made of another substance such as paper or polyester, you can perform a simple test. If you hold the tape against the light and it appears translucent then the tape is acetate. There may also be a slightly odd, vinegar smell coming from the tape. If so, this is bad news for you because the tape is probably suffering from ‘Vinegar Syndrome’. Richard Hess explains that

‘Vinegar syndrome occurs as acetate decomposes and forms acetic acid. This is a well-known degradation mode for acetate film. High temperature and humidity levels, the presence of iron oxide, and the lack of ventilation all accelerate the process. Once it has started it can only be slowed down, not reversed.’

Acetate tape is also particularly vulnerable to excessive heat exposure, which makes it shrink in size. This is why you should never bake acetate tape! When acetate tape is exposed to heat it reaches what is known as the liquid-glass transition phase, the temperature where the material composition starts to change shape from a hard and relatively brittle state into a molten or rubber-like state. Although glass transition is reversible, it certainly is destructive. In other words, you can change the tape back from molten to a hard substance again but the tape would be unplayable.

While acetate backed tape has certain advantages over polyester tape in the migration process, namely it is easier to cleanly splice together tape that has broken as it has moved through the transport, unfortunately acetate tape is more fragile, and can get extremely stiff which makes it difficult to play back the tape at all. Even if you can pass the tape through the machine it may snap regularly, and will therefore require a lot of treatment in the transfer process. So if you have a valuable tape collection stored predominantly on acetate tape, we strongly recommend getting it migrated to digital format as soon as possible due to the fragility of the format. And if that whiff of vinegar is present, you need to move even more quickly!

Nov

2013

Voice Letter – Analogue Reel-to-Reel Tape Transfer

What can the packaging of a tape object tell you?

Even before a tape is played back prior to transfer the packaging can tell you a lot about how and where it has been stored, and what it was used for.

Whether the boxes include sparse notation or are covered in stamps from countries across the world, the places where the tape has been, and the personality of its owners, sometimes shines through.

The packaging can also provide insight about the cultural context of tape, like this 3″ spool that was marketed to link ‘absent friends’. The space on the back of the box to affix a stamp (that remains empty), shows how these tapes were posted to friends and family who lived far away from each other, prior to the introduction of the telephone.

The back of the tape indicates how it was used to record family gatherings, with precious recordings of ‘Grandma’s voice’ and ‘all of us’ together on rare occasions such as ‘Boxing Day 1962?’ And perhaps further recordings five years later, with the warning of the tape’s special content: ‘Elaine Don’t You Touch’, preventing further use.

Nov

2013

Big Data, Long Term Digital Information Management Strategies & the Future of (Cartridge) Tape

What is the most effective way to store and manage digital data in the long term? This is a question we have given considerable attention to on this blog. We have covered issues such as analogue obsolescence, digital sustainability and digital preservation policies. It seems that as a question it remains unanswered and up for serious debate.

We were inspired to write about this issue once again after reading an article that was published in the New Scientist a year ago called ‘Cassette tapes are the future of big data storage.’ The title is a little misleading, because the tape it refers to is not the domestic audio tape that has recently acquired much counter cultural kudos, but rather archival tape cartridges that can store up to 100 TB of data. How much?! I hear you cry! And why tape given the ubiquity of digital technology these days? Aren’t we all supposed to be ‘going tapeless’?

The reason for such an invention, the New Scientist reveals, is the ‘Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the world’s largest radio telescope, whose thousands of antennas will be strewn across the southern hemisphere. Once it’s up and running in 2024, the SKA is expected to pump out 1 petabyte (1 million gigabytes) of compressed data per day.’

Image of the SKA dishes

Researchers at Fuji and IBM have already designed a tape that can store up to 35TB, and it is hoped that a 100TB tape will be developed to cope with the astronomical ‘annual archive growth [that] would swamp an experiment that is expected to last decades’. The 100TB cartridges will be made ‘by shrinking the width of the recording tracks and using more accurate systems for positioning the read-write heads used to access them.’

If successful, this would certainly be an advanced achievement in material science and electronics. Smaller tape width means less room for error on the read-write function – this will have to be incredibly precise on a tape that will be storing a pretty extreme amount of information. Presumably smaller tape width will also mean there will be no space for guard bands either. Guard bands are unrecorded areas between the stripes of recorded information that are designed to prevent information interference, or what is known as ‘cross-talk‘.They were used on larger domestic video tapes such as U-Matic and VHS, but were dispensed with on smaller formats such as the Hi-8, which had a higher density of magnetic information in a small space, and used video heads with tilted gaps instead of guard bands.

The existence of SKA still doesn’t explain the pressing question: why develop new archival tape storage solutions and not hard drive storage?

Hard drives were embraced quickly because they take up less physical storage space than tape. Gone are the dusty rooms bursting with reel upon reel of bulky tape; hello stacks of infinite quick-fire data, whirring and purring all day and night. Yet when we consider the amount of energy hard drive storage requires to remain operable, the costs – both economic and ecological – dramatically increase.

The report compiled by the Clipper Group published in 2010 overwhelmingly argues for the benefits of tape over disk for the long term archiving of data. They state that ‘disk is more than fifteen times more expensive than tape, based upon vendor-supplied list pricing, and uses 238 times more energy (costing more than the all costs for tape) for an archiving application of large binary files with a 45% annual growth rate, all over a 12-year period.’

This is probably quite staggering to read, given the amount of investment in establishing institutional architecture for tape-less digital preservation. Such an analysis of energy consumption does assume, however, that hard drives are turned on all the time, when surely many organisations transfer archives to hard drives and only check them once every 6-12 months.

Yet due to the pressures of technological obsolescence and the need to remain vigilant about file operability, coupled with the functional purpose of digital archives to be quickly accessible in comparison with tape that can only be played back linearly, such energy consumption does seem fairly inescapable for large institutions in an increasingly voracious, 24/7 information culture. Of course the issue of obsolescence will undoubtedly affect super-storage-data tape cartridges as well. Technology does not stop innovating – it is not in the interests of the market to do so.

Perhaps more significantly, the archive world has not yet developed standards that address the needs of digital information managers. Henry Newman’s presentation at the Designing Storage Architectures 2013 conference explored the difficulty of digital data management, precisely due to the lack of established standards:

‘There are some proprietary solutions available for archives that address end to end integrity;
There are some open standards, but none that address end to end integrity;
So, there are no open solutions that meet the needs of [the] archival community.’

He goes on to write that standards are ‘technically challenging’ and require ‘years of domain knowledge and detailed understanding of the technology’ to implement. Worryingly perhaps, he writes that ‘standards groups do not seem to be coordinating well from the lowest layers to the highest layers.’ By this we can conclude that the lack of streamlined conversation around the issue of digital standards means that effectively users and producers are not working in synchrony. This is making the issue of digital information management a challenging one, and will continue to be this way unless needs and interests are seen as mutual.

Other presentations at the recent annual meeting for Designing Storage Architectures for Digital Collections which took place on September 23-24, 2013 at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, also suggest there are limits to innovation in the realm of hard drive storage. Gary Decad, IBM, delivered a presentation on the ‘The Impact of Areal Density and Millions of Square Inches of Produced Memory on Petabyte Shipments for TAPE, NAND Flash, and HDD Storage Class‘.

For the lay (wo)man this basically translates as the capacity to develop computer memory stored on hard drives. We are used to living in a consumer society where new improved gadgets appear all the time. Devices are getting smaller and we seem to be able buy more storage space for cheaper prices. For example, it now costs under £100 to buy a 3TB hard drive, and it is becoming increasingly more difficult to purchase hard drives which have less than 500GB storage space. Compared with last year, a 1TB hard drive was the top of the range and would have probably cost you about £100.

A 100TB storage unit in 2010, compared with a smaller hard drive symbolising 2020.

Does my data look big in this?

Yet the presentation from Gary Decad suggests we are reaching a plateau with this kind of storage technology – infinite memory growth and reduced costs will soon no longer be feasible. The presentation states that ‘with decreasing rates of areal density increases for storage components and with component manufactures reluctance to invest in new capacity, historical decreases in the cost of storage ($/GB) will not be sustained.’

Where does that leave us now? The resilience of tape as an archival solution, the energy implications of digital hard drive storage, the lack of established archival standards and a foreseeable end to cheap and easy big digital data storage, are all indications of the complex and confusing terrain of information management in the 21st century. Perhaps the Clipper report offers the most grounded appraisal: ‘the best solution is really a blend of disk and tape, but – for most uses – we believe that the vast majority of archived data should reside on tape.’ Yet it seems until the day standards are established in line with the needs of digital information managers, this area will continue to generate troubling, if intriguing, conundrums.

Post published Nov 18, 2013

Nov

2013

Digitising NAB radio broadcast cartridges

The NAB Cartridge (named after the National Association of Broadcasters) was a mainstay of radio broadcasting from the late 1950s-1990s. It was replaced by the mini disc and computerised broadcast automatons.

NAB Cartridges were used primarily for jingles, station identifications, commercials and music. Each cartridge comprised of several recordings of the same, short jingle. Mechanically the tape is designed to play on an endless loop. This required limited manual operation such as rewinding or fast-forwarding, and enabled short recordings to be accessed efficiently and accurately during live broadcasts.

Because they were used in broadcast NAB Cartridges often used the best quality tape available at the time which was usually AMPEX. As readers of the blog will know, this is bad news if you want to listen to the tape a few years down the line. We baked the tapes so they could be played back again, and were then transferred using a SONIFEX HS Cartridge player.

You can listen to one of the incredibly cheesy jingles below!

Nov

2013

Digitising Shedding Magnetic Multi-track Tape & the history of John Peel favourites BOB

An important part of digitisation work we do is tape restoration. Often customers send us tape that have been stored in less than ideal conditions that are either too hot, cold or damp, which can lead to degradation.

In the excellent Council on Library and Information Sources’ report on Magnetic Storage and Handling (1995), they set the ideal archival storage conditions for magnetic tape at ‘significantly lower than room ambient (as low as 5 centrigade)’, with no less than 4 degrees variation in temperature at 20% room humidity. They suggest that ‘the conditions are specifically designed to reduce the rate of media deterioration through a lowering of the temperature and humidity content of the media.’

Of course most people do not have access to such temperature controlled environments, or are necessarily thinking about the future when they store their tape at home. Sometimes manufacturers recommended to store tape in a ‘cool, dark place’, but often tape is not adorned with any such advice. This leads to us receiving a lot of damaged tape!

As we are keen to emphasise to customers, it is possible to salvage most recordings made on magnetic analogue tape that appear to be seriously damaged, it just requires a lot more time and attention.

For example, we were recently sent a collection of 3” multi-track tapes that had been stored in fairly bad conditions. Nearly all the tapes were degraded and needed to be treated. A significant number of these tapes were AMPEX so were suffering from binder hydrolysis, a.k.a. sticky shed syndrome in the digitisation world. This is a chemical process where binder polymers used in magnetic tape constructions become fragmented because the tape has absorbed water from its immediate environment. When this happens tapes become sticky and sheds when it is played back.

Baking the AMPEX tapes is a temporary treatment for binder hydrolysis, and after baking they need to be migrated to digital format as soon as possible (no more than two weeks is recommended). Baking is by no means a universal treatment for all tapes – sticky shed occurs due to the specific chemicals AMPEX used in their magnetic tape.

Cleaning shedding tape

Other problems occur that require different kinds of treatment. For example, some of the 3” collection weren’t suffering from sticky shed syndrome but were still shedding. We were forewarned by notes on the box:

The tapes recorded on TDK were particularly bad, largely because of poor storage conditions. There was so much loose binder on these tapes that they needed cleaning 5 or 6 times before we could get a good playback.

We use an adapted Studer A80 solely for cleaning purposes. Tape is carefully wound and rewound and interlining curtain fabric is used to clean each section of the tape. The photo below demonstrates the extent of the tape shedding, both by the dirty marks on fabric, and the amount we have used to clean the collection.

You might think rigorous cleaning risks severely damaging the quality of the tape, but it is surprising how clear all the tapes have sounded on playback. The simple truth is, the only way to deal with dry shedding is to apply such treatment because it simply won’t be able to playback clearly through the machine if it is dirty.

Loss of lubricant

Another problem we have dealt with has been the loss of lubricant in the tape binder. Tape binder is made up of a number of chemicals that include lubricant reservoirs, polymers and magnetic particles.

Lubricants are normally added to the binder to reduce the friction of the magnetic topcoat layer of the tape. Over time, the level of the lubricant decreases because it is worn down every time the tape is played, potentially leading to tape seizures in the transport device due to high friction.

In such circumstances it is necessary to carefully re-lubricate the tape to ensure that it can run smoothly past the tape heads and play back. Lubrication must be done sparingly because the tape needs to be moist enough to function effectively, but not too wet so it exacerbates clogging in the tape head mechanism.

Restoration work can be very time consuming. Even though each 3″ tape plays for around 20 minutes, the preparation of tapes can take a lot longer.

Another thing to consider is these are multi-track recordings: eight tracks are being squeezed onto a 1/4″ tape. This means that it only takes a small amount of debris to come off, block the tape heads, dull the high frequencies and ultimately compromise the transfer quality.

It is important, therefore, to ensure tapes are baked, lubricated or cleaned, and heads are clear on the playback mechanism so the clarity of the recording can realised in the transfer process.

Now we’ve explored the technical life of the tape in detail, what about the content? If you are a regular visitor to this blog you will know we get a lot of really interesting tape to transfer that often has a great story behind it. We contacted Richard Blackborow, who sent the tapes, to tell us more. We were taken back to the world of late 80s indie-pop, John Peel Sessions, do it yourself record labels and a loving relationship with an 8 track recorder.

A Short History of BOB by Richard Blackborow

Back in 1983 I was a 17 year old aspiring drummer, still at school in North London and in an amateur band. Happily for me, at that time, my eldest brother, also a keen musician, bought a small cottage in a village called Banwell, which is 20 or so miles outside of Bristol, near Weston Super Mare. He moved there to be near his work. The cottage had a big attic room and he installed a modest 8-track studio into it so that he could record his own music during his spare time. The studio was based around a new Fostex A8 reel-to-reel machine and the little mixing desk that came with it.

The equipment fascinated me and I was a regular visitor to his place to learn how to use it and to start recording my own music when he wasn’t using it.

Skip forward a couple of years and I am now 19, out of school, deferring my place at university and in a new band with an old friend, Simon Armstrong. My brother’s work now takes him increasingly abroad, so the studio is just sitting there doing nothing. Simon and I begin to write songs with the express intention of going to Banwell every time we had a decent number of tunes to record. Over the next ten years it becomes part of the routine of our lives! We formed a band called BOB in 1986, and although we still lived in London, we spent a lot of time in that small studio in Banwell – writing, recording demos, having wild parties! By this time my brother had moved to the US, leaving me with open access to his little studio.

The band BOB had modest success. John Peel was a keen fan and a great supporter, we toured loads around the UK and Europe and made lots of singles and an album or two, as well as recording 5 BBC sessions.

To cut a long story short, we loved that little studio and wrote and recorded some 300 songs over the ensuing 10 years…the studio gear finally dying in about 1995. Most recordings were for/by BOB, but I also recorded bands called The Siddeleys and Reserve (amongst others).

The tapes we recorded have been lying around for years, waiting to be saved!

Recent interest in BOB has resulted in plans to release two double CDs. The first contains a re-issued album, all the BBC sessions and a few rarities. The second CD, planned for next year, will contain all of the BOB singles, plus a whole CD of the best of those demos we recorded. It was for this reason that all of those old tapes were sent to Adrian to be transferred to digital. I now have a studio near my home in West Cornwall, close to Land’s End, where I will be mixing all the material that Great Bear have been working on. The demos map our progression from pretty rubbish schoolboy aspirants to reasonably accomplished songwriters. Some of the material is just embarrassing, but a good chunk is work I am still proud of. We were very prolific and the sheer number of reels that Adrian has transferred is testament to that. There is enough material there for a number of CDs, and only time will tell how much is finally released.

Listen to the recently transferred Convenience demo

This is a bit of a rarity! It’s the demo (recorded on the little 8-track machine in Banwell) for a BOB single that came out in 1989. It’s called Convenience and I wrote and sang it. This early version is on one of the tapes that Adrian has transferred, so, like many of the rest of the songs, it will be re-mixed this winter for digital formats and released next year.

This is a link to the video we made for the song back in 1989 in a freezing warehouse in Hull! It appeared on Kats Karavan – The History of John Peel on the Radio compilation that was released in 2009.

***

If you want the latest news from BOB you can follow them on twitter. You can also pre-order the expanded edition of their 1991 album Leave the Straight Life Behind from Rough Trade. It will be available from the end of January 2014. A big thank you to Richard for sending us the photos, his writing and letting us include the recording too!

Nov

2013

Jack Hollingshead’s lost Apple recordings on reel-to-reel tape

Digital technologies have helped to salvage all manner of ‘lost’ or ‘forgotten’ recordings. Whole record labels, from the recently featured Bristol Archive Records to institutional collections like Smithsonian Folkways, are based on the principle of making ‘hard to access’ recordings available in digital form.

Occasionally we get such rare recordings in the Greatbear studio, and we are happy to turn the signal from analogue to digital so the music can be heard by new audiences. Last week we were sent a particularly interesting collection of tapes: a box of nearly 40 3”-10.5” reel to reel tapes from the songwriter and artist Jack Hollingshead, who sadly passed away in March 2013. The tapes are in good condition, although the spools are pretty dirty, most probably from being stored under the bed or at the back of a cupboard, as these things often are! Jack’s tape came to our attention after a phone call from the writer Stefan Granados, who wanted to arrange for a few songs to be digitised for a research project he is doing focused around the Beatles’ Apple Records company.

The Beatles set up Apple Records in 1968 as an outlet for their own and emerging artists’ recordings. Well known performers who were signed to Apple included Mary Hopkin, Ravi Shankar, James Taylor and many others. But there were also a number of artists who recorded sessions with Apple, but for one reason or another, their music was never released on the label. This is what happened to Jack’s music. Jack’s Apple sessions are psychedelic pop-folk songs with striking melodies, song cousins of drowsy Beatles hits like ‘Across the Universe’. He recorded seven songs in total, which we received on magnetic tape and acetate disc, the test cut of the recording that would have been printed on vinyl. We digitised from the magnetic tape because the disc was in fairly poor condition and we didn’t know how many times the disc had been played.

Listen to ‘Vote for ME’ by Jack Hollingshead

It wasn’t the first time that Jack’s work had aroused record company interest. When he was 16 he signed a contract with Aberbach publishers. Like his experience with Apple a few years later, nothing came of the sessions, and because the companies owned the recordings, he was not able to release them independently.

Jack soon became very frustrated by the record industry in the late 1960s and decided he would do it himself. This was ten years before home recording became widely accessible, so it was not easy, either financially or technically.

In the 1970s a series of serious accidents, and a spell in prison, proved to be disruptive for his musical career. Jack’s prison sentence, received for growing marijuana he was using for medical pain relief purposes, was however fairly positive. It gave him time to focus on playing guitar and he wrote his best songs while incarcerated.

The back of a test acetate is grooveless

He continued to write and record music throughout his life, and there is a significant amount of material that Trina Grygiel, who is responsible for managing Jack’s estate, is determined to organise and release in his memory.

Jack was also prodigiously talented artist in other mediums, and turned his hand to puppet making, wax painting, gardening and property restoration. His obituary described him as a ‘perfectionist, in all his artistic, creative and practical endeavours he would settle for nothing less.’

Nov

2013

Transfer Digital Betacam (DigiBeta) to Quicktime or AVI now, one day they will be obsolete

Even relatively recent born-digital formats like Digital Betacam (or DigiBeta, as it’s often referred to) should be viewed as a potentially obsolete format. This Standard Definition (SD) format while very popular for many years is not the preferred delivery format now the industry has embraced High Definition (HD).

When serviced these machines are very reliable and would be worked hard in a production environment. Designed to be serviced with little expense spared these were some of Sony’s most expensive decks and even if second hand values of machines have dropped recently, new spares have not. As with most video formats though as they become less popular the spares availability will become a problem as parts inventory dry up. One day and it may not be that far away a popular format like DigiBeta will become a threatened, obsolete format.

Digital Betacam recorders were introduced in 1993, superseding the Betacam and Betacam SP, while costing significantly less, and being dramatically smaller than (!), the D-1.

We are particularly pleased with this machine because there are relatively low hours on its original head drum (1000 hours). The average headlife for this format is up to three times that or more, depending on the environment it was used in.

If the machine was used in a heavy production environment, for example, it would be constantly drawing in air to cool the electronics and, potentially, large amounts of dust and debris with it. This is one of the factors affecting head life.

Part of the service kit installed on the DigiBeta is designed to counter such damage because it allows you to replace the filters around the head drum area should they become clogged.

The big problem, as with so many of these machines, is acquiring relevant parts to ensure they can be serviced when they break down. Spare parts for DigiBeta machines can be expensive, costing several thousand pounds for a replacement head drum.

This machine has needed some work recently to keep it running smoothly. The loading gear had split which meant it couldn’t load tapes and gave reel motor errors. These were fixed easily by replacing the broken parts. After these repairs were completed the picture was still however displaying errors. This was because the bearing on the pinch roller was worn resulting in too much movement in the tape path. With the problem diagnosed a new pinch roller was installed and our new machine is working beautifully!

So send us your DigiBeta tapes!

Oct

2013

UNESCO World Audiovisual Heritage Day – 27 October

In 2005 UNESCO (United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) decided to commemorate 27 October as World Audiovisual Heritage Day. The theme for 2013 was ‘Saving Our Heritage for the Next Generation’. Even though we are a day late, we wanted to write a post to mark the occasion.

UNESCO argue that audiovisual heritage is a unique vehicle for cultural memory because it can transcend ‘language and cultural boundaries’ and appeal ‘immediately to the eye and the ear.’

World Audiovisual Heritage Day aims to recognise both the value and vulnerability of audiovisual heritage. It aims to raise awareness that much important material will be lost unless ‘resources, skills, and structures’ are established and ‘international action’ taken.

Many important records of the 20th and 21st century are captured on film, yet digitally preserving this material generates specific problems, which we often discuss on this blog. Andrea Zarza Canova emphasises this point on the British Library’s blog:

‘World Day for Audiovisual Heritage is an important moment to celebrate and draw attention to the efforts currently being made in audiovisual preservation. But the story doesn’t end here as the digital environment raises its own preservation challenges concerning the ephemerality of websites and digital formats. Saving our heritage for the next generation involves engaging with the ongoing complexities of preservation in a rapidly changing environment.’

World Audiovisual Heritage Day is an ideal opportunity to delve into UNESCO’s Memory of the World collection whose audiovisual register features rare footage including photo and film documentation of Palestinian refugees, footage of Fritz Lang’s motion picture Metropolis (1927), documentary heritage of Los olvidados (“The Young and the Damned”), made in 1950 by Spanish-Mexican director Luis Buñuel, documentary heritage of Aram Khachaturian the world renowned Armenian composer and many others. Of the 301 items in the Memory of the World collection, 57 are audiovisual or have significant audiovisual elements.

Digital preservation is central to our work at the Greatbear. We see ourselves as an integral part of the wider preservation process, offering a service for archive professionals who may not always have access to obsolete playback machines, or expert technical knowledge about how best to transfer analogue tape to digital formats. So if you need help with a digitisation project why not get in touch?

UNESCO would surely approve of our work because we help keep the audiovisual memory of the world alive.

Oct

2013

Digital Preservation and Copyright

Most customers who send us tape to digitise own the copyright of their recording: it is material they have created themselves, be it music, spoken word or film.

Occasionally customers are not so sure if they own the full copyright to their recordings. This is because a single piece of work can have multiple copyright holders.

For example, films and songs can have many different contributors, such as the person who made the recording, the songwriter and performers. There are performing rights royalties which are paid to a songwriter, composer or publisher whenever their music is played or performed in any public space or place; mechanical rights royalties which are paid to the songwriter, composer or publisher when music is reproduced as a physical product or for broadcast or online, and performers rights royalties which are paid to the people performing on the record. It can seem like a bit of a minefield, and you do have to be really careful, particularly if want to re-publish the works in a commercial context.

A box of full of reel to reel tapes, the spools are dirty because of how they were stored

A collection of tapes that include original recordings made by the customer

The simple truth is, if you do not have full permission of all copyright holders, you would break the law if you digitised a tape and re-published it commercially.

Copyright, Intellectual Property and Digital Preservation is a tricky area to negotiate. Currently ‘there is still no exception in UK law for preservation copying. For materials which are still in copyright, permissions should be sought from copyright holders prior to any copying being done. This area is under consideration though with museums, libraries and archives lobbying for change’ (Jisc Digital Media).

What this means basically is that archives, libraries and museums are effectively restricted in how much material they can legally preserve in digital form. Andrew Charlesworth explains in a very useful report for the Digital Preservation Coalition on ‘Intellectual Property Rights for Digital Preservation’ (2012)

‘In “Chapter III: Acts permitted in relation to copyright works”, the C opyright D esigns and P atents A ct 1988 provides for a series of permissible activities that would otherwise be barred for breach of a rights holder’s exclusive rights. These include the “fair dealing provisions” which, for example, state that making transient copies is an integral and essential part of certain technological processes (s.28), and using all or part of a copyright work for non-commercial research or private study (s.29), criticism or review, or reporting current events (s.30), do not constitute infringements’ (11).

Clearly copyright law as it stands places immense restrictions in a digital environment where copying and sharing all kinds of things is pretty much the norm. What are the arguments then for changing copyright laws? In Imagine there is no copyright and cultural conglomerates too by Joost Smiers and Marieke Van Schinjdel, published by the Institute of Network Cultures‘ Theory on Demand series, they argue that removing copyright from cultural products will ensure that ‘our past and present heritage of cultural expression, our public domain of artistic creativity and knowledge will no longer be privatised’ (6).

Making cultural heritage publicly available is an argument for transforming current copyright laws across the range of political positions. While Smiers and Van Schinjdel interpret privatisation embedded in copyright law as linked to commercial power, the implicit argument in the DPC report is that opening up current restrictions can only be good for business. In this particular domain we see how the value of archival information has shifted in the digital landscape, so that it is increasingly seen as a resource through which money can be made.

A transformation of copyright laws would not necessarily lead to a weakening of commercial interests as Smiers and Van Schinjdel speculate, but would most probably enable the re-use of information across a range of profit and profit-making initiatives. Charlesworth insists we are ‘clinging to copyright practices that reflect outdated business models rather than attempting to establish new practices to address the prevailing mixed analogue/digital environment’ (7).

The digital information revolution has required all sectors of society to change how they relate to, use, record, save and consume information. While we have all become, to a lesser or more degree, record keepers, this brief survey of copyright law may help us appreciate the challenges professional archivists face in negotiating this complex area. After all, ‘life would be much simpler for archivists if the law relating to the preservation of copyright works in general, and digital works in particular, was both clarified and, where necessary, extended to permit more robust strategies for collection, preservation and reuse of copyright works’ (5).

Oct

2013

Digitise VHS Tapes – Bristol’s Meet Your Feet

We recently digitised some VHS tapes from when Bristol-based band Meet Your Feet performed on HTV in 1990. Meet Your Feet

‘formed in 1988 as a result of three of the women getting together to start a women’s music workshop, Meet Your Feet played its first gig in June 1988, when asked to get a set together for a Benefit Gig against section 28. This gig was so successful that the band decided to stay together and gradually the original line-up of the early years of the band evolved: Carol Thomas, vocals; Diana Milstein, founder member, bass and lyricist; Diggy, percussion; Heie Gelhaus, founder member, keyboards and songwriter; Julie Lockhart, vocals; Karen Keen, sax; Sue Hewitt, founder member, drums and songwriter; Vicki Burke, sax’ (taken from the Women’s Liberation Music Archive).

During the 80s the band achieved great success and performed at prestigious festivals such as Glastonbury and WOMAD, as well as appearing on Radio 4’s Women’s Hour. They played together until 1992 before disbanding, reformed in 2010 and continue to play shows in Bristol and beyond. Meet Your Feet’s style, which draws from Latin, Jazz and Soul influences, interspersed with passionate, upbeat political lyrics, align them with other ‘women’s music’ bands from the 1980s, such as The Guest Stars and Hi-Jinx.

Meet Your Feet from Adrian Finn on Vimeo.

The video clip we digitised is interesting because it indicates how novel women’s bands were in 1990.

After the band finish performing their new single, they take part in a short interview where they are asked:

‘Its an obvious question, but I am going to ask it, why all women?’

Julie Lockhart, one of the singers, responds wittily, but not without a tinge of bewilderment, ‘Um, we were born that way!’

Can you imagine an all male group being asked a similar question in a television interview, either now or in the early 1990s?! It just wouldn’t happen because no one notices if all the members of a group are male, it just seems completely normal.

The interview goes on to emphasise gender issues, rather than focus on other aspects, such as themes in their music or that it is a large group (there are nine people in the band after all, which is a lot!)

This is not a criticism of the interviewer’s questions as such. Yet the fact it was necessary to asks them about their gender speaks volumes about how surprising it was to see women playing music together. The interview continues as follows:

Presenter: Are there any real advantages to being an all female group?

Sue Hewitt: We listen to each other more, and spin ideas of each other a lot more easily

Julie Lockhart: We giggle a lot more

Presenter: Do you row a lot because you are on the road, its a hard life isn’t it, very intense?

Julie Lockhart: No, that’s the obvious difference we never row!

Presenter: Do you find it hard to be taken seriously by men who come to see an all girl band?

Sue Hewitt: Well no, not all the time. I think initially some men take the view of ‘oh well, its just a bunch of girls on stage’ but when we get up there and start playing they think, ohhh [they can play as well]

It is frustrating that such questions had to be asked, and maybe they wouldn’t be now – although it is still often the case that in music, as in other areas of cultural life, women’s gender is marked, while male gender is not. We have all heard, for example, the phrase ‘female-fronted band’. When do we ever hear of bands that are ‘male-fronted’?

It is really valuable to have access to recordings such as those of Meet Your Feet, not only as a documentation of their performances, but also to demonstrate the attitudes and assumptions that women faced when they participated in a male dominated cultural field.

It is also good to know that Meet Your Feet are still performing and undoubtedly upsetting a few stereotypes and expectations along the way, so make sure you catch them at a show soon!

Oct

2013

Parsimonious Preservation – (another) different approach to digital information management

We have been featuring various theories about digital information management on this blog in order to highlight some of the debates involved in this complex and evolving field.

To offer a different perspective to those that we have focused on so far, take a moment to consider the principles of Parsimonious Preservation that has been developed by the National Archives, and in particular advocated by Tim Gollins who is Head of Preservation at the Institution.

In some senses the National Archives seem to be bucking the trend of panic, hysteria and (sometimes) confusion that can be found in other literature relating to digital information management. The advice given in the report, ‘Putting Parsimonious Preservation into Practice‘, is very much advocating a hands-off, rather than hands-on approach, which many other institutions, including the British Library, recommend.

The principle that digital information requires continual interference and management during its life cycle is rejected wholesale by the principles of parsimonious preservation, which instead argues that minimal intervention is preferable because this entails ‘minimal alteration, which brings the benefits of maximum integrity and authenticity’ of the digital data object.

As detailed in our previous posts, cycles of coding and encoding pose a very real threat to digital data. This is because it can change the structure of the files, and risk in the long run compromising the quality of the data object.

Minimal intervention in practice seems here like a good idea – if you leave something alone in a safe place, rather than continually move it from pillar to post, it is less likely to suffer from everyday wear and tear. With digital data however, the problem of obsolescence is the main factor that prevents a hands-off approach. This too is downplayed by the National Archives report, which suggests that obsolescence is something that, although undeniably a threat to digital information, it is not as a big a worry as it is often presented.

Gollins uses over ten years of experience at the National Archives, as well as the research conducted by David Rosenthal, to offer a different approach to obsolescence that takes note of the ‘common formats’ that have been used worldwide (such as PDF, .xls and .doc). The report therefore concludes ‘that without any action from even a national institution the data in these formats will be accessible for another 10 years at least.’

10 years may seem like a short period of time, but this is the timescale cited as practical and realistic for the management of digital data. Gollins writes:

‘While the overall aim may be (or in our case must be) for ―permanent preservation […] the best we can do in our (or any) generation is to take a stewardship role. This role focuses on ensuring the survival of material for the next generation – in the digital context the next generation of systems. We should also remember that in the digital context the next generation may only be 5 to10 years away!’

It is worth mentioning here that the Parsimonious Preservation report only includes references to file extensions that relate to image files, rather than sound or moving images, so it would be a mistake to assume that the principle of minimal intervention can be equally applied to these kinds of digital data objects. Furthermore, .doc files used in Microsoft Office are not always consistent over time – have you ever tried to open a word file from 1998 on an Office package from 2008? You might have a few problems….this is not to say that Gollins doesn’t know his stuff, he clearly must do to be Head of Preservation at the National Archives! It is just this ‘hands-off, don’t worry about it’ approach seems odd in relation to the other literature about digital information management available from reputable sources like The British Library and the Digital Preservation Coalition. Perhaps there is a middle ground to be struck between active intervention and leaving things alone, but it isn’t suggested here!

For Gollins, ‘the failure to capture digital material is the biggest single risk to its preservation,’ far greater than obsolescence. He goes on to state that ‘this is so much a matter of common sense that it can be overlooked; we can only preserve and process what is captured!’ Another issue here is the quality of the capture – it is far easier to preserve good quality files if they are captured at appropriate bit rates and resolution. In other words, there is no point making low resolution copies because they are less likely to survive the rapid successions of digital generations. As Gollins writes in a different article exploring the same theme, ‘some will argue that there is little point in preservation without access; I would argue that there is little point in access without preservation.’

This has been bit of a whirlwind tour through a very interesting and thought provoking report that explains how a large memory institution has put into practice a very different kind of digital preservation strategy. As Gollins concludes:

‘In all of the above discussion readers familiar with digital preservation literature will perhaps be surprised not to see any mention or discussion of “Migration” vs. “Emulation” or indeed of ―“Significant Properties”. This is perhaps one of the greatest benefits we have derived from adopting our parsimonious approach – no such capability is needed! We do not expect that any data we have or will receive in the foreseeable future (5 to 10 years) will require either action during the life of the system we are building.’

Whether or not such an approach is naïve, neglectful or very wise, only time will tell.

Oct

2013

Bristol Archive Records – ¼ inch studio master tapes, ½ inch 8 track multi-track tapes, audio cassettes, DAT recordings and Betamax digital audio recordings

Bristol Archive Records is more than a record label. It releases music, books and through its website, documents the history of Bristol’s punk and reggae scenes from 1977 onwards. You can get lost for hours trawling through the scans of rare zines and photographs, profiles of record labels, bands, discographies and gig lists. Its a huge amount of work that keeps on expanding as more tapes are found, lurking in basements or at that unforeseen place at the back of the wardrobe.

Greatbear has the privilege of being the go-to digitisation service for Bristol Archive Records, and many of the albums that grace the record store shelves of Bristol and beyond found their second digital life in the Greatbear Studio.

The tapes that Mike Darby has given us to digitise include ¼ inch studio master tapes, ½ inch 8 track multi-track tapes, audio cassettes, DAT recordings and Betamax digital audio recordings. The recordings were mostly made at home or in small commercial studios, often they were not stored in the best conditions. Some are demos, or other material which has never been released before. Many were recorded on Ampex tape, and therefore needed to be baked before they were played back, and we also had to deal with other physical problems with the tape, such as mould, but they have all, thankfully, been fixable.

After transfers we supply high quality WAV files as individual tracks or ‘stems’ to label manager Mike Darby, which are then re-mastered before they are released on CD, vinyl or downloads.

Bristol Archive Records have done an amazing job ensuring the cultural history of Bristol’s music scenes are not forgotten. As Mike explains in an interview on Stamp the Wax:

‘I’m trying to give a bit of respect to any individual that played in any band that we can find any music from. However famous or successful they were is irrelevant. For me it’s about acknowledging their existence. It’s not saying they were brilliant, some of it was not very good at all, but it’s about them having their two seconds of “I was in that scene”.’

While Darby admits in the interview that Bristol Archive Records is not exactly a money spinner, the cultural value of these recordings are immeasurable. We are delighted to be part of the wider project and hope that these rare tapes continue to be found so that contemporary audiences can enjoy the musical legacies of Bristol.

Oct

2013

1/2 inch EIAJ skipfield reel to reel videos transferred for Stephen Bell

We recently digitised a collection of 1/2 inch EIAJ skipfield reel to reel videos for Dr Stephen Bell, Lecturer in Computer Animation at Bournemouth University.

CLEWS SB 01 from Stephen Bell on Vimeo.

Stephen wrote about the piece:

‘The participatory art installation that I called “Clews” took place in “The White Room”, a bookable studio space at the Slade School of Art, over three days in 1979. People entering the space found that the room had been divided in half by a wooden wall that they could not see beyond, but they could enter the part nearest the entrance. In that half of the room there was a video monitor on a table with a camera above it pointing in the direction of anyone viewing the screen. There was also some seating so that they could comfortably view the monitor. Pinned to the wall next to the monitor was a notice including cryptic instructions that referred to part of a maze that could be seen on the screen. Participants could instruct the person with the video camera to change the view by giving simple verbal instructions, such as ‘up’, “down”, “left”, “right”, “stop”, etc. until they found a symbol that indicated an “exit”.’

My plan was to edit the video recordings of the event into a separate, dual screen piece but it was too technically challenging for me at the time. I kept the tapes though, with the intention of completing the piece when time and resources became available. This eventually happened in 2012 when, researching ways to get the tapes digitized, I discovered Greatbear in Bristol. They have done a great job of digitizing the material and this is the first version of piece I envisaged all those years ago.’

Nice to have a satisfied customer!

Sep

2013

7″ 8 track reel to reel tapes recorded on a Fostex A8

We were recently sent a collection of 7″ 8-track reel-to-reel tapes. All the 8-track tapes were recorded using Dolby C noise reduction on a Fostex A8 machine. They hadn’t been stored in optimum conditions and as many were recorded on AMPEX tape, we did need “bake” them prior to transfer, to treat binder hydrolysis.

The A-8 was part of the home recording revolution that took the ’80s by storm. The A-8 in particular was popular because it was the first machine to offer eight tracks on just one 1/4″ tape.

The machine, like its ‘first mate’ the 350 Mixer, were not meant for professionals but enthusiastic amateurs who were happy to work things out themselves. ‘Sure you won’t know everything right off. But you won’t have to. Just hook up to the 350 (our instructions are easy and explicit) and go to work. You can learn the key to incredible flexibility as you go. While you are working on your music. Not before,’ were the encouraging words in the 350 mixer manual.

Products like the Fostex A-8 enabled bands and artists who would never have got a commercial record deal to record their music. All sorts of weird and wonderful sounds were recorded on multi-track tape recorders, and they often received airplay on John Peel‘s radio shows.

When we transfer reel-to-reel multi-track tapes we save each stem individually, so you can remix the recordings digitally if you want to. If you spent far too much time in the early ’80s playing with your home studio and have a load of old tapes lying in your cupboard, we can help give them a new lease of life. With Ampex tapes in particular, it is critical to transfer them now because they will deteriorate quickly if action is not taken soon.

Visit our Tascam 388 Studio 8 ¼ inch 8-track / Fostex R8 ¼ inch 8-track / Fostex E8 ¼ inch 8-track audio tape transfer page for more info.

Sep

2013

Paper-backed Soundmirror ‘magnetic ribbon’ – early domestic magnetic tape recorders

The oldest tape we have received at the Greatbear is a spool of paper backed magnetic tape, c.1948-1950. It’s pretty rare to be sent paper-backed tape, and we have been on a bit of adventure trying to find more about its history. On our trail we found a tale of war, economics, industry and invention as we chased the story of the ‘magnetic ribbon’.

The first thing to recount is how the development of magnetic tape in the 1930s and 1940s is enmeshed with events in the Second World War. The Germans were pioneers of magnetic tape, and in 1935 AEG demonstrated the Magnetophon, the first ever tape recorder. The Germans continued to develop magnetic tape, but as the 1930s wore on and war declared, the fruits of technological invention were not widely shared – establishing sophisticated telecommunication systems was essential for the ‘war effort’ on both sides.

Towards the end of the war when the Allies liberated the towns and cities of Europe, they liberated its magnetic tape recording equipment too. Don Rushin writes in ‘The Magic of Magnetic Tape.’

‘By late 1944, the World War II Allies were aware of the magnetic recorder developed by German engineers, a recorder that used an iron-powder-coated paper tape, which achieved much better sound quality that was possible with phonograph discs. A young Signal Corps technician, Jack Mullin, became part of a scavenging team assigned to follow the retreating German army and to pick up items of electronic interest. He found parts of recorders used in the field, two working tape recorders and a library of tapes in the studios of Radio Frankfurt in Bad Nauheim.’

In the United States in WW2, significant resources were used to develop magnetic tape. ‘With money no object and the necessity of adequate recording devices for the military, developments moved at a brisker pace’, writes Mark Mooney.

This where our paper tape comes into the equation, courtesy of Polish-born inventor Semi J. Begun. Begun began working for the Brush Development Company in 1938, who were one of the companies contracted to develop magnetic tape for the US Navy during the war. In his position at Brush Begun invented the ‘Sound Mirror.’ Developed in 1939-1940 but released on the market in 1946, it was the first magnetic tape recorder to be sold commercially in the US post WW2.

As the post-war rush to capitalise on an emerging consumer market gathered apace, companies such as 3M developed their own magnetic tapes. Paper backed magnetic tape was superseded toward the end of the 1940s by plastic tape, making a short but significant appearance in the history of recording media.

This however is a story of magnetic tape in the US, and our tape was recorded in England, so the mystery of the paper tape has not been solved. Around the rim of the rusted spool it states that it is ‘Licensed by the Brush Development Co U.S.A’, ‘Made in England’, ‘Patents Pending’ and ‘Thermionic Products Ltd.’

Thermionic were the British company who acquired the license to build the Soundmirror in 1948. Barry M Jones, who has collected a wider history of the British tape recorder, home studio and studio recording industries writes, ‘[Soundmirror] was the first British-built domestic tape-recorder, whereas the first British built-and-designed tape recorder was the Wright & Weaire, which appeared a few weeks later. Production began in autumn 1948 but the quality of the paper tape meant it shedded oxide too readily and clogged the heads!’

Production of the Soundmirrors continued to late 1954 so it is possible to date the tape as being recorded some time between 1948 and 1958. The weight of the spool and the tape is surprisingly heavy, the tape incredibly fragile, marking its passage through time with signs of corrosion and wear. It is a beautiful object, as many of the tapes we get are, that is entwined with the social histories of media, invention, economy and everyday life.

Sep

2013

A word about metadata and digital collections

Metadata is data about data. Maybe that sounds pretty boring, but archivists love it, and it is really important for digitisation work.

As mentioned in the previous post that focused on the British Library’s digital preservation strategies, as well as many other features on this blog, it is fairly easy to change a digital file without knowing because you can’t see the changes. Sometimes changing a file is reversible (as in non-destructive editing) but sometimes it is not (destructive editing). What is important to realise is changing a digital file irrevocably, or applying lossy instead of lossless compression, will affect the integrity and authenticity of the data.

What is perhaps worse in the professional archive sector than changing the structure of the data, is not making a record of it in the metadata.

Metadata is a way to record all the journeys a data object has gone through in its lifetime. It can be used to highlight preservation concerns if, for example, a file has undergone several cycles of coding and decoding that potentially make it vulnerable to degradation.

Metadata can in fact be split into three kinds, as Ian Ireland writes in this article:

‘technical data (info on resolution, image size, file format, version, size), structural metadata (describes how digital objects are put together such as a structure of files in different folders) and descriptive (info on title, subject, description and covering dates) with each type providing important information about the digital object.’

As the previous blog entry detailed, digital preservation is a dynamic, constantly changing sector. Furthermore, digital data requires far greater intervention to manage collections than physical objects and even analogue media. In such a context data objects undergo rapid changes as they adapt to the technical systems they are opened by and moved between. This would produce, one would speculate, a large stream of metadata.

What is most revealing about metadata surrounding digital objects, is they create a trail of information not only about the objects themselves. They also document our changing relationship to, and knowledge about, digital preservation. Metadata can help tell the story about how a digital object is transformed as different technical systems are adopted and then left behind. The marks of those changes are carried in the data object’s file structure, and the metadata that further elaborate those changes.

Like those who preserve physical heritage collections, a practice of minimal intervention is the ideal for maintaining both the integrity and authenticity of digital collections. But mistakes are made, and attempts to ‘clean up’ or otherwise clarify digital data do happen, so when they do, it is important to record those changes because they help guide how we look after archives in the long term.

Sep

2013

Digitisation strategies – back up, bit rot, decay and long term preservation

In a blog post a few weeks ago we reflected on several practical and ethical questions emerging from our digitisation work. To explore these issues further we decided to take an in-depth look at the British Library’s Digital Preservation Strategy 2013-2016 that was launched in March 2013. The British Library is an interesting case study because they were an ‘early adopter’ of digital technology (2002), and are also committed to ensuring their digital archives are accessible in the long term.

Making sure the UK’s digital archives are available for subsequent generations seems like an obvious aim for an institution like the British Library. That’s what they should be doing, right? Yet it is clear from reading the strategy report that digital preservation is an unsettled and complex field, one that is certainly ‘not straightforward. It requires action and intervention throughout the lifecycle, far earlier and more frequently than does our physical collection (3).’

The British Library’s collection is huge and therefore requires coherent systems capable of managing its vast quantities of information.

‘In all, we estimate we already have over 280 terabytes of collection content – or over 11,500,000 million items – stored in our long term digital library system, with more awaiting ingest. The onset of non-print legal deposit legislation will significantly increase our annual digital acquisitions: 4.8 million websites, 120,000 e-journal articles and 12,000 e-books will be collected in the first year alone (FY 13/14). We expect that the total size of our collection will increase massively in future years to around 5 petabytes [that’s 5000 terabytes] by 2020.’

All that data needs to be backed up as well. In some cases valuable digital collections are backed up in different locations/ servers seven times (amounting to 35 petabytes/ 3500 terabytes). So imagine it is 2020, and you walk into a large room crammed full of rack upon rack of hard drives bursting with digital information. The data files – which include everything from a BWAV audio file of a speech by Natalie Bennett, leader of the Green Party after her election victory in 2015, to 3-D data files of cunieform scripts from Mesopotamia, are constantly being monitored by algorithms designed to maintain the integrity of data objects. The algorithms measure bit rot and data decay and produce further volumes of metadata as each wave of file validation is initiated. The back up systems consume large amounts of energy and are costly, but in beholding them you stand in the same room as the memory of the world, automatically checked, corrected and repaired in monthly cycles.

Such a scenario is gestured toward in the British Library’s long term preservation strategy, but it is clear that it remains a work in progress, largely because the field of digital preservation is always changing. While the British Library has well-established procedures in place to manage their physical collections, they have not yet achieved this with their digital ones. Not surprisingly ‘technological obsolescence is often regarded as the greatest technical threat to preserving digital material: as technology changes, it becomes increasingly difficult to reliably access content created on and intended to be accessed on older computing platforms.’ An article from The Economist in 2012 reflected on this problem too: ‘The stakes are high. Mistakes 30 years ago mean that much of the early digital age is already a closed book (or no book at all) to historians.’

There are also shorter term digital preservation challenges, which encompass ‘everything from media integrity and bit rot to digital rights management and metadata.’ Bit rot is one of those terms capable of inducing widespread panic. It refers to how storage media, in particular optical media like CDs and DVDs, decay over time often because they have not been stored correctly. When bit rot occurs, a small electric charge of a ‘bit’ in memory disperses, possibly altering program code or stored data, making the media difficult to read and at worst, unreadable. Higher level software systems used by large institutional archives mitigate the risk of such underlying failures by implementing integrity checking and self-repairing algorithms (as imagined in the 2020 digital archive fantasy above). These technological processes help maintain ‘integrity and fixity checking, content stabilisation, format validation and file characterisation.’

300 years, are you sure?

Preservation differences between analogue and digital media

The British Library isolate three main areas where digital technologies differ from their analogue counterparts. Firstly there is the issue of ‘proactive lifestyle management‘. This refers to how preservation interventions for digital data need to happen earlier, and be reviewed more frequently, than analogue data. Secondly there is the issue of file ‘integrity and validation.’ This refers to how it is far easier to make changes to a digital file without noticing, while with a physical object it is usually clear if it has decayed or a bit has fallen off. This means there are greater risks to the authenticity and integrity of digital objects, and any changes need to be carefully managed and recorded properly in metadata.

Finally, and perhaps most worrying, is the ‘fragility of storage media‘. Here the British Library explain:

‘The media upon which digital materials are stored is often unstable and its reliability diminishes over time. This can be exacerbated by unsuitable storage conditions and handling. The resulting bit rot can prevent files from rendering correctly if at all; this can happen with no notice and within just a few years, sometimes less, of the media being produced’.

A holistic approach to digital preservation involves taking and assessing significant risks, as well as adapting to vast technological change. ‘The strategies we implement must be regularly re-assessed: technologies and technical infrastructures will continue to evolve, so preservation solutions may themselves become obsolete if not regularly re-validated in each new technological environment.’

Establishing best practice for digital preservation remains a bit of an experiment, and different strategies such as migration, emulation and normalisation are tested to find out what model best helps counter the real threats of inaccessibility and obsolescence we may face in 5-10 years from now. What is encouraging about the British Library’s strategic vision is they are committed to ensuring digital archives are accessible for years to come despite the very clear challenges they face.

Sep

2013

Remembering Ray Dolby pioneer of analogue noise reduction

We have already written about noise reduction this week, but did so without acknowledging the life of Ray Dolby, one of the inventors of video tape recording while working at Ampex and the inventor and founder of Dolby Noise Reduction, who died on 12 September 2013.

An obituary in The Guardian described how:

‘His noise-reduction system worked by applying a pre-emphasis to the audio recording, usually boosting the quieter passages. The reverse process was used on playback. Removing the boost – lowering the level – also removed most of the tape hiss that accompanied all analogue recordings. Of course, people did not care how it worked: they could hear the difference.’

Dolby managed to solve a clear problem blighting analogue tape recording: the high frequency noise or tape hiss inherent when recording on magnetic tape.

Like many professional recording studios from the 1960s onwards, the Great Bear Studio uses the Dolby A noise-reduction system that we use to play back Dolby A encoded tape. On the Dolby A the input signal is split into four individual frequency bands and provided 10 dB of broadband noise reduction overall.

We also have a Dolby SR system that was introduced in 1986 to improve upon analogue systems and in some cases surpass rapidly innovating digital sound technologies. Dolby SR maximises the recorded signal at all times using a complex series of filters that change according to the input signal and can account for up to 25dB noise reduction.

Sep

2013

Audio Noise Reduction and Finn’s World War Two Stories

We get a range of tape and video recordings to digitise at the Great Bear. Our attention is captured daily by things which are often unusual, interesting and historically significant in their own way.

Last week we received a recording of Pilot Officer Edwin Aldridge ‘Finn’ Haddock talking about his experiences in the Second World War. Finn, who has since passed away, had made the tape in preparation for a talk he was doing at a local school, using the recording in order to rehearse his memories.

Despite the dramatic nature of the story where he is shot down in Northern France, sheltered by the French resistance and captured by the Germans, it is told in a remarkably matter of fact, detached manner. This is probably because the recording was made with no specific audience in mind, but was used to prompt his talk.

Finn’s story gives us a small insight into the bravery and resilience of people in such exceptional circumstances. The recording tells us what happened in vivid terms, from everyday facts such as what he ate during his shelter and capture to mass executions conducted by the Gestapo.

The now digitised tape recording, which was sent to us by his niece, will be shared among family members and a copy deposited with the local history club in Wheatley Hill, where Finn was born.

Finn was also interviewed by the Imperial War Museum about his experiences, which can be accessed if you click on this link.

On a technical note, when we were sent the tape we were asked if we could reduce the noise and otherwise ‘clean up’ the recording. While the question of how far it is reasonable to change the original recording remains an important consideration for those involved in digital archiving work, as was discussed last week on the Great Bear tape blog, there are some things which can be done if there is excessive hiss or other forms of noise on a recording.

The first step is to remove transient noise which manifest as clicks and pops which can affect the audibility of the recording. Family home recordings that were made with cheap tape recorders and microphones often picked up knocks and bangs, and there were some on Finn’s tape that were most probably the result of him moving around as he recorded his story.

The second step is to deploy broadband noise reduction, which removes noise across the audio spectrum. To do this we use high pass and low pass filters which effectively smooth off unwanted noise at either end of the frequency range. The limited frequency range of the male voice means that it is acceptable to employ filters at 50 Hz (high pass) and 8000 Hz (low pass) and this will not affect the integrity of the recording.

It is important to remember that noise reduction is always a bit of a compromise because you don’t want to clean something up to the extent that it sounds completely artificial. This is why it is important to keep the ‘raw’ transfer as well as an uncompressed edited version because we do not know what noise reduction techniques may be available in five, ten or twenty years from now. Although we have a lot of experience in achieving high quality digital transfers at the Great Bear, any editing we do to a transfer is only one person’s interpretation of what sounds clear or appropriate. We therefore always err on the side of caution and provide customers with copies of uncompressed raw, edited and compressed access copies of digitised files.

Finn’s story noise reduced

The ‘raw’ transfer

A further problem in noise reduction work is that it is possible to push noise reduction technology too much so that you end up creating ‘artefacts’ in the recording. Artefacts are fundamental alterations of the sound quality in ways that are inappropriate for digitisation work.

Another thing to consider is destructive and non-destructive editing. Destructive editing is when a recording has been processed in software and changed irrevocably. Non-destructive editing, not surprisingly, is reversible, and Samplitude, the software we use at the Great Bear, can save all the alterations made to the file so if certain editing steps need to be undone they can be.

Again, while in essence the principles of digital transfer are simple, the intricacies of the work are what makes it challenging and time consuming.

Sep

2013

Measuring signals – challenges for the digitisation of sound and video

In a 2012 report entitled ‘Preserving Sound and Moving Pictures’ for the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Technology Watch Report series, Richard Wright outlines the unique challenges involved in digitising audio and audiovisual material. ‘Preserving the quality of the digitized signal’ across a range of migration processes that can negotiate ‘cycles of lossy encoding, decoding and reformatting is one major digital preservation challenge for audiovisual files’ (1).

Wright highlights a key issue: understanding how data changes as it is played back, or moved from location to location, is important for thinking about digitisation as a long term project. When data is encoded, decoded or reformatted it alters shape, therefore potentially leading to a compromise in quality. This is a technical way of describing how elements of a data object are added to, taken away or otherwise transformed when they are played back across a range of systems and software that are different from the original data object.

To think about this in terms which will be familiar to people today, imagine converting an uncompressed WAV into an MP3 file. You then burn your MP3s onto a CD as a WAV file so it will play back on your friend’s CD player. The WAV file you started off with is not the same as the WAV file you end up with – its been squished and squashed, and in terms of data storage, is far smaller. While smaller file size may be a bonus, the loss of quality isn’t. But this is what happens when files are encoded, decoded and reformatted.

Subjecting data to multiple layers of encoding and decoding does not only apply to digital data. Take Betacam video for instance, a component analogue video format introduced by SONY in 1982. If your video was played back using composite output, the circuity within the Betacam video machine would have needed to encode it. The difference may have looked subtle, and you may not have even noticed any change, but the structure of the signal would be altered in a ‘lossy’ way and can not be recovered to it’s original form. The encoding of a component signal, which is split into two or more channels, to a composite signal, which essentially squashes the channels together, is comparable to the lossy compression applied to digital formats such as mp3 audio, mpeg2 video, etc.

A central part of the work we do at Greatbear is to understand the changes that may have occurred to the signal over time, and try to minimise further losses in the digitisation process. We use a range of specialist equipment so we can carefully measure the quality of the analogue signal, including external time based correctors and wave form monitors. We also make educated decisions about which machine to play back tapes in line with what we expect the original recording was made on.

If we take for granted that any kind of data file, whether analogue or digital, will have been altered in its lifetime in some way, either through changes to the signal, file structure or because of poor storage, an important question arises from an archival point of view. What do we do with the quality of the data customers send us to digitise? If the signal of a video tape is fuzzy, should we try to stabilise the image? If there is hiss and other forms of noise on tape, should we reduce it? Should we apply the same conservation values to audio and film as we do to historic buildings, such as ruins, or great works of art? Should we practice minimal intervention, use appropriate materials and methods that aim to be reversible, while ensuring that full documentation of all work undertaken is made, creating a trail of endless metadata as we go along?

Do we need to preserve the ways magnetic tape, optical media and digital files degrade and deteriorate over time, or are the rules different for media objects that store information which is not necessarily exclusive to them (the same recording can be played back on a vinyl record, a cassette tape, a CD player, an 8 track cartridge or a MP3 file, for example)? Or should we ensure that we can hear and see clearly, and risk altering the original recording so we can watch a digitised VHS on a flat screen HD television, in line with our current expectations of media quality?

Richard Wright suggests it is the data, rather than operating facility, which is the important thing about the digital preservation of audio and audiovisual media.

‘These patterns (for film) and signals (for video and audio) are more like data than like artefacts. The preservation requirement is not to keep the original recording media, but to keep the data, the information, recovered from that media’ (3).

Yet it is not always easy to understand what parts of the data should be discarded, and which parts should kept. Audiovisual and audio data are a production of both form and content, and it is worth taking care over the practices we use to preserve our collections in case we overlook the significance of this point and lose something valuable – culturally, historically and technologically.

Sep

2013

Magnetic Reel to Reel Tape and New Transfer Machines – Pictures from the Greatbear Studio

The Greatbear studio always has a wealth of interesting material in it, that somehow have survived the test of time.

From racks stacked full of obsolete audio and video tape machines, to the infinite varieties of reel-to-reel tape that were produced by companies such as Scotch, E.M.I. and Irish Recording Tape.

As objects in themselves they are fascinating, instilled with the dual qualities of fragility and resilience, the boxes worn at the edges and sometimes marked with stamps, identificatory stickers or scrawled, handwritten notes.

A selection of ‘audio letters’ sent to us by a customer

The latest addition to the Great Bear Studio – the Fostex Model 80 8 Track Recorder

Sep

2013

Curating Digital Information or What Do You With Your Archive?

Today is the first day of iPres 2013, the 10th international conference on the preservation of digital objects held in Lisbon, Portugal. To mark the occasion we want to reflect on an issue that is increasingly important for the long term management of digital data: curation.

Anyone who has lived through the digital transition in the 21st century surely cannot ignore the information revolution they have been part of. In the past ten years, vast archives of analogue media have been migrated to digital formats and everyday we create new digital information that is archived and distributed through networks. Arcomen, who are running a workshop at iPres on ‘Archiving Community Memories’, describe how

‘in addition to the “common” challenges of digital preservation, such as media decay, technological obsolescence, authenticity and integrity issues, web preservation has to deal with the sheer size and ever-increasing growth and change rate of Web data. Hence, selection of content sources becomes a crucial and challenging task for archival organizations.’

As well as the necessary and sometimes difficult choices archival organisations have to make in the process of collecting an archive, there is then the issue of what to do with your data once it has been created. This is where the issue of digital curation comes in.

Screenshot of the SONY website from 1996

Traditionally, the role of the curator is to ‘take care’ and interpret collections in an art gallery or a museum. In contemporary society, however, there is an increasing need for people to curate collections that are exclusively digital, and can only be accessed through the web. Part of any long term digitisation strategy, particularly if an archive is to be used for education or research purposes, should therefore factor in plans and time for curation.

Curation transforms a digital collection from being the equivalent of a library, which may be searchable, organised and catalogued, into something more akin to an exhibition. Curation helps to select aspects of an archive in order to tell deliberate stories, or simply help the user navigate content in a particular way. Curating material is particularly important if an archive deals with a specialist subject that no one knows about because visitors often need help to manoeuvre large amounts of complex information. Being overwhelmed by content on the internet is an often cited expression, but ensuring digital content is curated carefully means it is more likely that people visiting your site will be able to cope with what they find there, and delve deeper into your digitsed archival treasures.

Like all things digital, there is no one steadfast or established guidelines for how to ensure your collection is curated well. The rapid speed that technology changes, from preferred archival formats, software to interface design, mean that digital curation can never be a static procedure. New multiple web authoring tools such as zeega, klynt and 3WDOC will soon become integrated into web design in a similar fashion to the current Web 2.0 tools we use now, therefore creating further possibilities for the visual, immersive and interactive presentation of digital archive material.

Screenshot of the Fostex website from Dec 1998

Curation is an important aspect of digital preservation in general because it can facilitate long term use and engagement with your collection. What may be lost when archive sites become pruned and more self-consciously arranged is the spontaneous and sometimes chaotic experience of exploring information on the web.

Ultimately though, digital curation will enable more people to navigate archival collections in ways that can foster meaningful, transformative and informative encounters with digitised material.

Aug

2013

The Magnetist – Audio Cassettes in Contemporary Culture

As lovers of magnetic tape and obsolete media, we keep our eyes open for people who remain attached to the formats most have forgot.

A recent film posted on Vimeo features the creative life of part time chef, noise musician and tape DJ Micke, also known as ‘The Magnetist’.

The film follows the Stockholm-based artist through his life as a ‘tapeologist.’ From demagnetising tape in order to create soundscapes, to running a club night comprised of tapes scavenged from wherever he can find them, Micke demonstrates how the audio cassette remains a source of inspiration within counter culture.

The Magnetist from Filibuster on Vimeo.

The wider resurgence of cassettes is evident from the forthcoming Cassette Store Day, an event that will be marked in record stores in the UK, USA, Europe and South America.

New tape labels are popping up all the time. Tapes are now often preferred to CD-Rs for short run albums in do it yourself punk culture, as releases blur the line between art object and collector item.

So what’s behind the sub-cultural obsession with the audio cassette tape? Perhaps it is no more complex than novelty value and nostalgia. It may however be evidence of the persistence of analogue technologies in an era where digital technologies appear to have colonised our relationship to sound and vision.

Is there a yearning to resist the ways digital media shapes how we listen to music, both at the level of sound quality, and the promiscuous skipping through mp3 files?

You simply can’t do that with tape. You have to rewind, fast forward or listen the whole way through. Its a mechanical process, often shrouded in hiss.

What is certain, fashion or no fashion, the wheels on the Great Bear tape machines will keep turning.

Aug

2013

C-120 Audio Cassette Transfer – the importance of high quality formats

In archiving, the simple truth is formats matter. If you want the best quality recording, that not only sounds good but has a strong chance of surviving over time, it needs to be recorded on an appropriate format.

Most of us, however, do not have specialised knowledge of recording technologies and use what is immediately available. Often we record things within limited budgets, and need to make the most of our resources. We are keen to document what’s happening in front of us, rather than create something that will necessarily be accessible many years from now.

At the Great Bear we often receive people’s personal archives on a variety of magnetic tape. Not all of these tapes, although certainly made to ensure memories were recorded, were done on the best quality formats.

Recently we migrated a recording of a wedding service from 1970 made on C-120 audio cassette.

Image taken using a smart phone @ 72 dpi resolution

C60 and C90 tapes are probably familiar to most readers of this blog, but the C-120 was never widely adopted by markets or manufacturers because of its lesser recording quality. The C-120 tape records for an hour each side, and uses thinner tape than its C90 and C60 counterparts. This means the tape is more fragile, and is less likely to produce optimum recordings. Thinner tapes is also more likely to suffer from ‘print-through‘ echo.

As the Nakamichi 680 tape manual, which is pretty much consulted as the bible on all matters tape in the Great Bear studio, insists:

‘Choosing a high quality recording tape is extremely important. A sophisticated cassette deck, like the 680, cannot be expected to deliver superior performance with inferior tapes. The numerous brands and types of blank cassettes on the market vary not only in the consistency of the tape coating, but in the degree of mechanical precision as well. The performance of an otherwise excellent tape is often marred by a poor housing, which can result in skewing and other unsteady tape travel conditions.’

The manual goes on to stress ‘Nakamichi does not recommend the use of C-120 or ferrichrome cassettes under any circumstances.’ Strong words indeed!

It is usually possible to playback most of the tape we receive, but a far greater risk is taken when recordings are made on fragile or low quality formats. The question that has to be thought through when making recordings is: what are you making them for? If they are meant to be a long term record of events, careful consideration of the quality of the recording format used needs to be made to ensure they have the greatest chance of survival.

Such wisdom seems easy to grasp in retrospect, but what about contemporary personal archives that are increasingly ‘born digital’?

A digital equivalent of the C-120 tape would be the MP3 format. While MP3 files are easier to store, duplicate and move across digital locations, they offer substantially less quality than larger, uncompressed audio files, such as WAVs or AIFFs. The current recommended archival standard for recording digital audio is 24 bit/ 48 kHz, so if you are making new recordings, or migrating analogue tapes to digital formats, it is a good idea to ensure they are sampled at this rate

In a recent article called ‘3 Ways to Change the World for Personal Archiving’ on the Library of Congress’ Digital Preservation blog, Bill LeFurgy wrote:

‘in the midst of an amazing revolution in computer technology, there is a near total lack of systems designed with digital preservation in mind. Instead, we have technology seemingly designed to work against digital preservation. The biggest single issue is that we are encouraged to scatter content so broadly among so many different and changing services that it practically guarantees loss. We need programs to automatically capture, organize and keep our content securely under our control.’

The issue of format quality also comes to the fore with the type of everyday records we make of our digital lives. The images and video footage we take on smart phones, for example, are often low resolution, and most people enjoy the flexibility of compressed audio files. In ten years time will the records of our digital lives look pixelated and poor quality, despite the ubiquity of high tech capture devices used to record and share them? Of course, these are all speculations, and as time goes on new technologies may emerge that focus on digital restoration, as well as preservation.

Ultimately, across analogue and digital technologies the archival principles are the same: use the best quality formats and it is far more likely you will make recordings that people many years from now can access.

Jul

2013

Greatbear Studio Visit – Archive for Mathematical Sciences and Philosophy

This week in the Greatbear Studio we are being visited by Michael Wright, Director of The Archive Trust for Research in Mathematical Sciences and Philosophy.

The Archive Trust for Research in Mathematical Sciences and Philosophy holds an extensive collection of audio and video recordings on subjects in mathematics, physics and philosophy, particularly the philosophy and foundations of mathematics and the exact sciences recorded since the early 1970s.

The website explains further the rationale for collecting the recordings:

Such recordings allow historians of science and mathematics to form a better appreciation of the background to the emergence of new ideas; and also of the complex pattern formed by “roads not taken” – ideas which for whatever reason were laid aside, or apparently subsumed in other developments. Those ideas may later re-emerge in ways yielding a new perspective on those developments. Such a rich archive of primary oral source material naturally aids historical study of the Sciences and the conceptual and philosophical questions to which they give rise.

The project started in 1973 when Michael recorded lectures, seminars and courses relating to Maths and Philosophy when he was a doctoral student. The early recordings were made in Oxford, London and Cambridge and were done on an enthusiastic, if amateur basis. In the 1980s and 1990s the recording process became more systematic, and more video recordings were taken. The archive is still collecting material, and Michael often travels to conferences and lectures to record contemporary debates in the field, as he is this week when he travels to Warsaw for Samuel Eilenberg Centenary conference (there are recordings of Eilenberg’s lectures and an interview collected in the archive).

What started as a hobby for Michael has now become a full time commitment. The archive contains a staggering 37,000 recordings, those he made and ones solicited from other individuals. They include recordings of figures such as Imre Lakatos, Ilya Prigogine, contemporary philosopher Alain Badiou and many more.

The majority of recordings from 1973-2003 were recorded on audio cassette format, although some were done on reel-to-reel recorders. Many of these recordings remain on analogue tape, and the biggest challenge for the archive is now to find the funds to migrate several thousand hours of recordings to digital format.

The archive also track downs and publishes existing material that may be collected in other archives, or are stored in people’s personal collections. For Michael the biggest revelation in constructing the archive was finding out about the amount of material people have that are sitting in the back of their cupboards. This is either because people have forgotten they exist, or because they simply do not known what to do with them.

The archive became a charitable trust in 2008 and names among its trustees English mathematical physicist and philosopher Sir Roger Penrose, and Martin Rees, former Master of Trinity College and Emeritus Professor of Cosmology at the University of Cambridge and President of the Royal Society.

Its an exciting, and transitional, time for the archive as it plans to take its next steps. In the coming years there are plans to develop the website through uploading ‘born digital’ information, attain funds for wholesale digitisation of tape and paper resources and continue to collect recordings. This ambitious project is well on its way to becoming a vital and unique contribution to the subject, and will interest many other people who are simply curious about these rich and complex topics.

Jul

2013

How sustainable is digitisation?

Often when we think about the reasons to digitise magnetic tape collections we are considering the future. We digitise to make material accessible so it can be used again, or to preserve it so subsequent generations can benefit or learn from it. But how sustainable is digitisation and digital technology? What is the ecological impact of the widespread and breathtakingly fast adoption of digital technologies since the late 1990s?

At an everyday, consumer level, the use of digital technologies comes with real human and environmental costs, as Professor Toby Miller and Professor Richard Maxwell demonstrate in a recent article in The Guardian. They argue that the very metaphors we use to describe digital media – ‘virtual,’ ‘cloud’, ‘streams’ and ‘mobiles’ – dangerously obscure the fact they come from materials, such as the minerals Tatalun, Tungsten, Tin and Gold, and cover up the exploitative labour conditions, and war torn situations from which they are extracted:

‘Suggestions that we live in a dematerialised world are not only exaggerated; they are doing more harm than good. One person’s cloud is another’s pollution, and one person’s mobile is another’s enslavement. From electronic waste to conflict minerals, the new media leave an indelible mark on bodies and the Earth they inhabit.’

The extent of violence and exploitation that lie at the end of the digital supply chain is hardly a secret. At a consumer level there seems to be very little resistance to the use of mobile digital devices, probably because our very social existence is dependent upon them in a culture where media is pervasive. It is not easy to opt out, and what would you do if you did?

As heavy users of digital technologies we walk with our heads in the clouds, so to speak, unable to access the wider environmental impact of our actions. This impact is intensified by the pressure to continually upgrade our devices, as Dr Chris Priest writes,

‘the regularity with which you replace a device becomes more important in determining the overall footprint of the device. If we take a hypothetical device with a 50% use footprint, and replace it after two years rather than three, then it will increase our overall footprint by 25%. Of course, new devices might be becoming increasingly efficient and this could offset the increase to some extent. Though even if the new device used no power, it could not offset it completely.’

Yet these are speculations not empirical fact. It is hard to know concretely what the environmental consequences of becoming immediate adopters of the latest (fastest, smallest, bestest) digital technologies are. One thing is certain, new goods will appear and people will be told they can’t live without them. This is how an economy driven by innovation works.

Thinking about the uptake of digital technologies at an institutional level, it is clear that within a technological climate pre-disposed to the production of ‘digital waste’ and obsolescence, the mismanagement of energy resources in order to keep digital data ‘alive’ (that is useable, accessible) is a real possibility. One only need turn to the financial and technological waste produced from the BBC’s Digital Media Initiative (DMI) to confirm that the creation of technical systems devised to manage large digital archives are not moving at the same relentless speed as the neoliberal market.

Which begs the question: can there be an ecological solution to the problem of digitisation, and the use of digital technologies in an innovation/ obsolescence economy? Can digitisation ever be energy efficient, non-exploitative and flexible enough to cope with the technological changes that will inevitably happen? What would a sustainable and ethical approach to digital information management look like?

As our world gets increasingly networked these are pressing questions effecting everyone. And clearly understanding the wider impact of the use of technology on people and the earth is a serious issue, usually forgotten when scrolling through data feeds in a voracious, but often distracted, manner. These are admittedly big questions and we welcome comments, links and ideas on how to answer them.

As keen hoarders of mechanical waste from the analogue era who are passionate about making data accessible in digital form, we are contributing to a world that places unprecedented value on technological information.

Need this, however, always be at the expense of people and the world we share as currently it seems to be?

Jul

2013

Sony V62 EIAJ reel to reel video tape transfer for Barrie Hesketh

We have recently been sent a Sony V62 high density video tape by Barrie Hesketh. Barrie has had an active career in theatre and in 1966 he set up the Mull Little Theatre on the Isle of Mull off the West Coast of Scotland with his late wife Marianne Hesketh. Specialising in what Barrie calls the ‘imaginative use of nothing’ they toured the UK, Germany and Holland and gained a lot of publicity world wide in the process. Both Marianne and Barrie were awarded MBEs for their services to Scottish Theatre.

You can read a more detailed history of the Mull Little Theatre in this book written by Barrie.

Panasonic VTR NV-8030 transferring a tape

Panasonic VTR NV-8030 EIAJ ½” reel to reel video recorder

The video tape Barrie sent us came from when he and Marianne were working as actors in residence at Churchill College at Cambridge University. Barrie and Marianne had what Barrie described as ‘academic leanings,’ gained from their time as students at the Central College of Speech and Drama in London.

In a letter Barrie sent with the tape he wrote:

‘I own a copy of a video tape recording made for me by the University of Cambridge video unit in 1979. I was researching audience/actors responses and the recording shows the audience on the top half of the picture, and the actors on the bottom half – I have not seen the stuff for years, but have recently been asked about it.’

While audience research is a fairly common practice now in the Creative Arts, in 1979 Barrie’s work was pioneering. Barrie was very aware of audience’s interests when he performed, and was keen to identify what he calls ‘the cool part’ of the audience, and find out ways to ‘warm them up.’

Recording audience responses was a means to sharpen the attention of actors. He was particularly interested in the research to identify ‘includers’. These were individuals who influenced the wider audience by picking up intentions of the performers and clearly responding. The movement of this individual (who would look around from time to time to see if other people ‘got it’), would be picked up in the peripheral vision of other audience members and an awareness gradually trickled throughout. Seeing such behaviour helped Barrie to understand how to engage audiences in his subsequent work.

Barrie’s tape would have been recorded on one of the later reel-to-reel tape machines that conformed to the EIAJ Standard.

The EIAJ-1 was developed in 1969 by the Electronic Industries Association of Japan. It was the first standardized format for industrial/non-broadcast video tape recording. Once implemented it enabled video tapes to be played on machines made by different manufacturers.

Prior to the introduction of the standard, tapes could not be interchanged between comparable models made by different manufacturers. The EIAJ standard changed all this, and certainly makes the job of transferring tapes easier for us today! Imagine the difficulties we would face if we had to get exactly the right machine for each tape transfer. It would probably magnify the problem of tape and machine obsolescence effecting magnetic tape collections.

In the Greatbear Studio we have the National Panasonic Time Lapse VTR NV-8030 and Hitachi SV-640.

Like Ampex tapes, all the Sony EIAJ tape tend to suffer from sticky shed syndrome caused by absorption of moisture into the binder of the tape. Tapes need to be dehydrated and cleaned before being played back, as we did with Barrie’s tape.

The tape is now being transferred and Barrie intends to give copies to his sons. It will also be used by Dr Richard Trim in an academic research project. In both cases it is gratifying to give the these video tapes a new lease of life through digitisation. No doubt they will be of real interest to Barrie’s family and the wider research community.

Jul

2013

What is the future of analogue media?

In a recent blog article on the Presto Centre website, Richard Wright argues that ‘the audiovisual collections of the 20th century were analogue, and we are now at a critical time for considering the digital future of that analogue content.’ He goes on to say, emphatically:

‘All analogue audio and video formats are obsolete. Digital content walks through walls, travels at the speed of light, can be in many places at the same time, and can (with care) be perfectly copied, again and again. So digitisation has become the solution to the obsolescence of all analogue audio and video formats.’

Although careful not to make too clinical a statement, he bookmarks 15 April 2023 as the date when analogue obsolescence really kicks in.

We have written extensively on this blog about the problem of obsolescence, and how we collect machines and learn the skills to fix them.

A major problem is finding spare parts for machines after manufacturers stop producing them. Many components were made according to very precise specifications that are hard to make from scratch. When machines and their parts wear out it will therefore be difficult, if not impossible, to keep them working.

This means that the cost of transfers will rise due to machine scarcity. At an institutional level this may lead to selective decisions about what gets digitised and what doesn’t.

There is one analogue format that has flourished in the 21st century: vinyl.

Writing for music magazine The Wire, Numero Group’s Rob Sevier and Ken Shipley describe how ‘vinyl’s violent sales spike has been a lonely bright spot in what has been a 14 year deterioration in sales of recorded music’.

Yet the resilience of vinyl and other contemporary fringe uses of analogue media, such as the cassette tape and floppy disk, is not enough to stop the march of digitisation. For experts like Wright the digital future for the majority of people is inevitable, irresistible even, given how it enables collections to be open, replicable and accessible.

Yet committing to digital technologies as a preservation and access strategy does not solve our information problems, as we have been keen to stress on this blog. There is also a worrying lack of long term strategy for managing digital information, a problem which is ever more pronounced in film preservation where analogue tape is still marked as the original from which digital copies are made.

It is clear that the information we create, store and use is in transition. It probably always has been. The emergence of digital technologies has just made this a pressing issue, not only for large institutions, but for people as we go about our day to day lives.

‘Digitise now!!’ is Richard Wright’s advice – and of course we agree.

Potential Problems with EIAJ ½ Video Tapes

The possibility of collaboration

Openness in the digital preservation world

Problems with migrating early digital tape recordings

DOTS vs the (digital preservation) world

Digitisation and re-interpretation

Oral Testimonies of the First World War

Remembering the interruption

File Format Action Plans

Other Preservation Challenges

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