LISNews: Librarian News

Enjoy African music? Now you can listen to it on a VOA blog. The Voice of America has launched African Music Treasures, its first blog designed especially for African music fans around the world.

Matthew Lavoie, host of VOA's popular Music Time in Africa music show, will moderate the blog featuring music from VOA's extensive and rare African music collection, music commentary, audio clips, bios of interesting musicians, and chats with online participants.

"Our archive is overflowing with rare music from every country in Africa," said Lavoie. "I'm excited to share it with my fellow enthusiasts," he added.

The Sound Directions project at Harvard University and Indiana University announces the publication of Sound Directions: Best Practices for Audio Preservation, which is available as a PDF from www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/sounddirections/. This 168-page publication presents the results of two years of research and development funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities in the United States. This work was carried out by project and permanent staff at both institutions in consultation with an advisory board of experts in audio engineering, audio preservation, and digital libraries.

Sound Directions: Best Practices for Audio Preservation establishes best practices in many areas where they did not previously exist. This work also explores the testing and use of existing and emerging standards. It includes chapters on personnel and equipment for preservation transfer, digital files, metadata, storage, preservation packages and interchange, and audio preservation systems and workflows. Each chapter is divided into two major parts: a preservation overview that summarizes key concepts for collection managers and curators, followed by a section that presents recommended technical practices for audio engineers, digital librarians, and other technical staff. This latter section includes a detailed look at the inner workings of the audio preservation systems at both Harvard and Indiana. -- Read More

From The NY TImes:

...But then came digital. And suddenly the film industry is wrestling again with the possibility that its most precious assets, the pictures, aren’t as durable as they used to be.

The problem became public, but just barely, last month, when the science and technology council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released the results of a yearlong study of digital archiving in the movie business. Titled “The Digital Dilemma,” the council’s report surfaced just as Hollywood’s writers began their walkout. Busy walking, or dodging, the picket lines, industry types largely missed the report’s startling bottom line: To store a digital master record of a movie costs about $12,514 a year, versus the $1,059 it costs to keep a conventional film master.

Library acquires Pinter archive: The archive of Britain's leading writer and playwright, Harold Pinter, has been acquired by the British Library.

"We look forward to making the material accessible to researchers, and to playing our part in celebrating his life and work."