Sound and Vision digitizes Audio Collection by itself

January 15th 2008

Sound & Vision has made a start with the large-scale digitization of its analogue audio archive. To do so, the institute has set up its very own 'encoding street'. Converting the content is a tedious job, in which preserving quality and describing the material as broadly as possible have the first priority.

Hans Westerhof of Sound and Vision shortly outlines the trade-offs between converting audio in-house and letting imagery be digitized externally: 'Radio excerpts quite often used to be recorded continuously on a single tape. This means that after copying it from analogue to digital you have to cut the right places to turn the content into separate files, after which the right descriptions have to be added to their respective files. Sometimes these descriptions aren't complete – there appears to be more on the tape than indicated – or the data are simply wrong. Because we're close to the sources – the broadcasters – we can more easily trace where a certain excerpt belongs.'

Marcel Beun is senior technician at Sound and Vision, and an expert in the field of audio: 'From a technical viewpoint, it's better to play audiotapes back on the kind of machines they were originally recorded on. We still have several Telefunken M15 tape recorders, the type that was often used to record radio broadcasts. We had a search party looking for the things in the Mediapark; currently we have 30 in good working order.' When everything has been streamlined within the encoding street, Marcel Beun expects to be able to digitize at least 64 tapes a day. Hans Westerhof: 'This year, we aim to digitize 6.900 hours worth of audio.