Brandon Burke, associate archivist for recorded sound collections, and Jim Sam, audio specialist, participated in several activities at the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) annual conference held at the end of May in Washington, D.C.
Brandon led a meeting of ARSC’s Associated Audio Archivists (AAA) Committee, which he chairs. During the first of a two-part “In the Archives” series, Brandon also presented a tutorial, “Navigating the AAA Message Board,” which highlighted the Internet forum created by the AAA Committee under his leadership. Brandon later chaired the second “In the Archives” program, which included presentations about recorded sound preservation efforts at the National Archives and Records Administration, University of North Texas, and the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archives.
Jim attended every technical session at the conference including programs dealing with preservation workflow at many different organizations, the importance of header tags in digital audio as well as phase-in restoration equalization, simultaneous digitization of multiple objects, preserving born-digital audio, and new techniques in transferring physical, digital media. Additionally, he attended an evening meeting of the association’s Technical Committee.
During a tour of the Library of Congress’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, Brandon investigated and compared storage solutions for degraded sound media. Meanwhile, Jim talked with the center’s engineers about equipment and techniques for digitizing the archaic formats in many of Hoover’s collections.
