Friday, March 04, 2016

Digital Stewardship in a Radio Archive: An NDSR Project Update

Digital Stewardship in a Radio Archive: An NDSR Project Update. Mary Kidd, Erin Engle. The Signal. January 5, 2016. 
     This is an update on the Radio Archive project and includes:
  • a Digital Preservation Roadmap
  • an overview of the current digital production throughout the various stations
  • a network-wide analysis of NYPR’s digital holdings
The definition of what makes radio includes both traditional broadcasting as well as the digital formats, particularly the WAV and MP3 files, live and on-demand streaming audio and video, on-the-go podcasts, and social media posts. The archive will have to "develop new ways to address the fact that digital assets are often interconnected with other assets, rather than standalone audio objects".  Archives are not just safekeepers of the past, but informants of the present. The evolving identity of radio is influencing the development of a new and emerging field referred to as “radio preservation studies”.

An important part of the studies for the archive is to distinguish radio archives from traditional sound archives.They appear to be similar, but radio has its own distinct sound and modes of production. And radio archives require their own set of archival best practices that contextualize broadcast recordings. "Striking a balance between the archival priorities and the expectations of producers is quite possibly one of the greatest challenges for an archive embedded in a media station."

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