Crossing the Hurdle

Undoubtedly, this week marks a watershed in overcoming the technical hurdles the project has posed during the past few months. Several notable successes deserve highlighting:

• I have submitted a proposal for a poster session for the annual SAA Conference, which will be held in Austin, Texas this coming August. The description of the project is ...
  

This poster will depict a Capstone project undertaken at St. Edwards University at Austin toward fulfillment of a Masters of Science in Information Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. The project consists of a two-semester effort to conduct an inventory, catalog, and properly store and display approximately 2300 jazz long-playing records from the 1930s-1950s. The album collection, donated by a jazz history instructor at St. Edwards, contains most notable historical jazz musicians during the era noted. The core of the project consists of digitizing the collection, and making the contents available to students and researchers. Supporting objectives include identifying and integrating copyright law adherence; ensuring access capabilities promote use of the collection while conforming to existing copyright and fair use restrictions; establishing a viable technological solution to digital archiving consistent with contemporary practices; undertaking an outreach program to ensure visibility of the collection and supporting materials to encourage use; and collaboration with other jazz archivists when possible to solicit supportive solutions to the range of technical problems. The project anticipates at least some of the collection will be digitally available not later than mid-May 2009.

• Today, Thursday the 5th of February, marks the first successful music upload into the Content Pro "sandbox," following approximately five previous unsuccessful attempts. The song "He Lays the Reins In," by Iron & Wine, served as the test track;
• Today also marks the successful transmission of music data files from the turntable source thru the ART USBPhono converter via USB cable to the destination Dell Optiplex GX620 tower computer. From there, the music, a partial track from The Complete Pacific Live Jazz Recordings of the Chet Baker Quarter with Russ Freeman, was captured within Audacity, the software I will use for digitizing the albums, and then exported to both MP3 and WAV formats. Thus, I can begin the prioritization of music to select for digitizing to begin building the music library;
• Scheduled a meeting for Monday, February 9, with Georgia Harper, who is a copyright attorney who has assisted in creating and maintaining the "Copyright Crash Course" website hosted by the University of Texas Law School. We will review some of the outstanding conerns with fair use and copyright provisions under Section 108
• A one hour conference call with the Content Pro demonstration team allowed me to address five questions of concern in the evolution of the technical solution. The five questions posed were:

1. In CP, how do I upload audio files? Does CP “prefer” wav., MP3, or other format? (see foldout for the USB Phono Pro for examples of which formats it handles and Audacity).

2. Can I store liner notes—perhaps scanned in—and album art (definitely scanned in) in addition to making the actual music available?

3. Will CP permit us to firewall access to copyrighted material?

4. We are creating a digital repository of music; what can and will be stored on the CP server? Can it access STE’s server to play music when requested?

5. Will CP offer us a way to track users and access, to validate our strategy for making the collection available to our user population?

For now, these small victories suffice for reporting purposes. The achievement of these measures of progress suggest that at least a portion of the strategic objectives may be within range, in a reasonable period of time.

Also worth noting, there is the prospect of additional music donations to the archives, consisting of approximately 900 78s of early jazz recordings and possibbly other varied materials.

Next up: advancing the public outreach plan.