Variations, Jazz Appreciation Month, & Content Pro

The past several weeks have been key ones in advancing the digitization project.  Slowly, what has been primarily conceptual is taking shape.  Some general description of the project developments and some specific initiatives follow.

First, the challenge all along has been how to identify and exploit a platform that can accommodate the audio recordings and accompanying artwork and liner notes in a way that is most accessible and inviting to potential users, especially St. Edwards students and researchers.  Over the past four months, I have sought to master the technical aspects of Innovative Interfaces (Millennium) Content Pro (CP), a beta catalog system with which St. Edwards is a participating partner (along with other library systems such as Michigan State University, University of Western Ontario, University of San Diego, Binghamton Public Library, Westerville Public Library, and others).  This project entails a periodic conference call with the technical supervisor of the fielding, Rice Majors.  Once fully operational, it will integrate with the Scarborough-Phillips' library's companion catalog system Encore, which is replacing their previous system, OPAC.  

One week ago, in Seattle during the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) conference, I met with Rice, who was hosting an Innovative Interfaces booth.  We discussed some of the hurdles I have encountered, such as how to colocate the three data elements noted above.  Additionally, we discussed whether the Content Pro system will be compatible with Tom Lord's Discography (TJD), an online very thorough database that provides metadata in the form of discographical detail that I wish to use as a data source to feed into the Content Pro site for the Jazz in the Stacks portion of the catalog.  This option required me to research pricing options (estimated at $500 per year), compatibility, data reliability, and other aspects of suitability for adoption.  As of Thursday 19 March, my approach is that I have submitted to library contracting (Kate Silton) the necessary information to allow an account with TJD to be established.  ON Thursday, I called and discussed the technical aspects of how these two platforms will interact, and essentially, Mr. Lord indicated that his proposal is to provide a link through the CP site that will launch users into the database.  Thus, a user would expect to leave the CP site, licensed to provide access within CP, and navigate the user to the TJD database, where the relevant entry can be input.  

For now, we will pursue this option, although it still requires ensuring that CP can handle the leap outside its environment into the TJD one as part of the research process.  Additionally, of course, there are the technical hurdles of capturing the album cover artwork, the liner notes, ensuring making access to them does not violate copyright restrictions, and ensuring access is searchable and visually attractive.  In short, these efforts depict examples of the technical solutions I am pursuing to make the actual finding aids and catalog entries available, so that prospective users can identify and locate the music and associated intellectual content they seek.

Meanwhile, this past week Megan Winget's article on liner notes was net published on the ARSC listserv.  The article is available at this link.  The hosting site is the International Conference on Digital Libraries.

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Another relatively recent undertaking has been participation in ongoing work with Variations, a National Science Foundation-funded open source software initiative that Indiana University has provided leadership in exploring for the last fifteen years.  Its objective is to "provide online access to streaming audio and scanned score images in support of teaching, learning, and research," and which is designed to "enable institutions such as college and university libraries and music schools to digitize audio and score materials from their own collections, provide those materials to their students and faculty in an interactive online environment, and respect intellectual property rights."(1)  These objectives are perfectly complementary with the project here at St. Edwards, and provide an alternative solution to mounting the digital material in the event the selected course of action founders.

On March 4th, Variation hosted an online Webinar that lasted approximately an hour.  The Variations team provided prospective project participants with modeling samples of how the environment currently looks and feels; answered members' questions about the expectations going forward; and accepted recommendations for other features that will meet the targeted participants' needs.  Additionally, when summarizing the Webinar results with the S-P Library director Tom Leonhardt, he noted that Stanford's experience with the Archive of Recorded Sound, and that institution's development of an acceptable format and standard to provide user access to their sound archives.  According to its website, "the Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound is supplying audio examples for these pages in the au format, also called the uLaw, NeXT, or Sun Audio format. Our samples are provided as 8-bit, 22kHz monaural sound files, the largest being just over one megabyte in size."(2)  

Notes

1.  Dunn, Jon.  "[DIGLIB] Announcement:  Indiana University offers open source digital music library software."  February 20, 2009.  

2.  Stanford University.  "Sound Bytes:  The AU Format for Sound."  Online.  Accessed:  March 20, 2009.  Available at:  http://library.stanford.edu/depts/ars/collections/sound.html#samples

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Lastly, I continue to prepare for the April public outreach events.  While my next blog entry will lay out the proposed itinerary, for now I am attaching the trial flyer design announcing the events during the week 12-18 April.  The flyer was designed by Angela McNerney, my daughter, who is a graphic designer and marketing advertiser for Dell in Round Rock, Texas.

Community of Practice

Part of my education in this Capstone has been identifying what constitutes the "jazz community" in Austin, Texas, and establishing contact with it (& "them") and trying to build a sense of solidarity through interaction, collaboration, publicity, and most enjoyably, attendance at live performances. This process has grown like a spider web, allowing me to communicate with archivists at Tulane in New Orleans (Bruce Raeburne), Oberlin College in Ohio (Molly Johnson), Hamilton College in New York (Monk Rowe), the University of Idaho (Michael Tarabulski, who since has left there), and there are other archives-specific specialist who proved helpful.

Every step of this effort has required articulating and carefully solving multi-step problems, and that has required that I reach out and find other, better solutions that have already been tested and applied. For example, understanding HOW to physically digitize LPs and translate the information into digital content, resolve storage constraints, consider access and mechanical availability, etc., all required significant independent reading, research, site visits to see how different models have been implemented, etc. I gradually identified major functional areas of the project and continue to refine these. I have also had to modify my expectations as the realistic limitations of a one-person project become increasingly apparent. Despite this, however, knowing that various clusters of expertise exist, and that the people with whom I have already worked are generally ready to assist, I have found myself contemplating the underlying architecture, designed or ad hoc, of the community of practice that is emerging as I continue working. For example, the Association for Recorded Sound, whose listserv I joined early and have relief heavily for technical queries, led me also to the indispensable journal, ARSC Journal (avail at http://www.arsc-audio.org/journal.html) and related scholarly materials. So my conception of the projects real objectives, especially within the finite time between now and the technical conclusion of the Capstone (May 2009), has continuously morphed, in a positive way.

In my next posting, I will present a description of work I have been doing to host a series of Jazz Appreciation Month activities, 12-18 April 2009 (in conjunction with National Library Week).

Extending Outreach

If there's a live jazz music event, and no one comes to hear it, did it really produce any sound?

One of the objectives of the Jazz in the Stacks project is to promote awareness of the LP collection in the student, researcher, and wider communities. The "Specific Learning Objectives," for example, notes the following:

• Develop publicity objectives and strategy to enable awareness of the collection among the academic and local music culture communities in Austin and beyond. Organize, coordinate, and oversee Open House events to highlight the collection. Spring [2009] publicity events will take advantage of the learning experience and coordination efforts resulting from executing Archives Week Fall 2008 "Jazz in the Stacks" activity [conducted October 28 2008 at the Ragsdale Center on St. Edwards University campus].

That event included a joint lecture by Michael Tarabulski, who previously served as the lead archivist overseeing the International Jazz Collections at the University of Idaho (see website at http://www.ijc.uidaho.edu/) and a seasoned scholar on the challenging thickets of digitizing music; Michael was accompanied by Edward Meyer, the donor of the LP collection at St. Edwards, who explained his collecting methodology, his discovery of jazz worlds, and his motivation in donating the collection to the university, where he teaches History of Jazz classes.

The principal upcoming activity to promote awareness in the Spring of 2009 consists of celebrations in conjunction with Jazz Appreciation Month, a nationwide commemoration of jazz music and culture sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution. St. Edwards will encourage awareness through posters, displays (with the hope of presenting albums and liner notes with adjacent music players that will allow students to actually sample works from selected artists), and some live music events timed to coincide with National Library Week ( April 12-18). We have invited two jazz organizations--the Austin Traditional Jazz Society (visit their site at http://www1.onr.com/atjs/) and the Central Texas Jazz Society (visit site at http://www.centexjazz.com/) to perform live to help broaden the jazz audience.

As an opportunity to further increase interest in not only the materials housed here at St. Edwards, we hope to initiate an oral history program as well, with the performers from the two jazz societies providing an interviewee pool. Austin is frequently touted as the Live Music Capital of the World, and with the April Jazz Appreciation Month activities, we hope to put jazz on the city's map, at least a little more prominently than it has been in the past!

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.

Obeying the Law

One of the challenges I have to overcome is becoming knowledgeable about the current provisions of copyright law and fair use and how any given approach I adopt conforms to such restrictions. Researching this issue reveals that there is copyright, especially regarding digital products such as music files, is a dynamic and hotly contested area. Currently, for example, the Music Library Association (MLA), Association of Recorded Sound Recordings (ARSC), as well as the American Library Association are all pressing for revisions to US Code governing how digital intellectual property is handled, especially with regard to libraries and archives.

Several resources have helped guide me in this part of my project. Some notable reference works include:

• Copyright Law for Librarians and Educators: Creative Strategies and Practical Solutions (2nd ed.), by Kenneth D. Crews, published by ALA (2006)
• Does Your Project Have a Copyright Problem: A Decision-Making Guide for Librarians, by Mary Brandt Jensen, published by McFarland in 1996. Because Jensen's book appears to be one of several standards for copyright problems, and because it is slightly dated given the pace of Internet and digital world change, I wrote the author on January 29, 2009 to see whether she might have suggestions for where a researcher might find updates.
• Intellectual Property and Information Wealth: Issues and Practices in the Digital Age, edited by Peter K. Yu. This work is the fourth in a series of works under "International Intellectual Property Law and Policy," published by Praeger (2007).
• The Center for Intellectual Property Handbook, edited by Kimberly Bonner and published by the Center for Intellectual Property at the University of Maryland (2006).
  

Additionally, there is considerable helpful material available on the Web. Particularly helpful, for example, in part because it is locally generated and thus offers the possibility of direct access of the information developers, is a website available through the University of Texas at Austin:

• Copyright Crash Course, available at http://www.utsystem.edu/OGC/IntellectualProperty/ccmcguid.htm. The link directs the viewer to "Multimedia Fair Use Guidelines," and the site provides easy-to-navigate links to other resources and reference materials, and even allows UT employees the opportunity to ask specific questions of a lawyer.

Other sites also are useful in resolving thorny copyright issues. For example:

• The Music Library Association offers a rich site with relevant material at http://www.musiclibraryassoc.org/copyright/Resources/ReportsAndStudies. As a key stakeholder in ongoing discussions about proposed revisions to Section 108 of the USC, one should consider their respective interests. They also provide considerable discussion of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and other pending legislation. MLA's coverage is available at http://www.musiclibraryassoc.org/copyright/Resources/OnlineResources
  

Another critical resource is the...

• ARSC's material on copyright and fair use, available at http://www.arsc-audio.org/copyright-committee.html.
  

There is more, needless to say, but for now, this at least gives a flavor of some footbridges one must cross before committing music to hard drive, and certainly, before making it accessible to the public, using any kind of connecting software or platform.

The Big Picture

January 21 2009

In September 2008, I began a journey that would lead me to engage an array of intellectual challenges relating to jazz music--both recorded work and history of the genre, archives, legal rights for access, digital librarianship, and public outreach. I coined the project "Jazz in the Stacks," because ultimately, the goal was to make approximately 2300 jazz LPs stored in the archives of St. Edwards University in Austin available to students and researchers.



The purpose of the blog is to document my progress toward reaching the goal of digital access to the music, liner notes, and cover art. I will post a weekly update that reflects the major challenges, advances, and obstacles toward achieving the goals of the project. This undertaking constitutes a spring 2009 Capstone Project toward completion of a Master's of Science in Information Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.