by Patrick Feaster, Media Preservation Specialist, Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative, Indiana University 

What’s the oldest documented use of the word “jazz”?  The leading authority on such questions is the Oxford English Dictionary, and if you were to consult the latest print edition in the Reference Reading Room at Wells Library, you’d find an answer:

1909 C. Stewart Uncle Josh in Society (gramophone-record), One lady asked me if I danced the jazz.[1]

You probably expected “jazz” to have first appeared in something like a book or a newspaper or a magazine—the kinds of source the OED usually cites.  But sound recordings, like video recordings and films, are part of the documentary record too, and there’s no reason why the earliest attested example of a word shouldn’t sometimes take the form of recorded audio—even as important a word as “jazz.”

Of course, scholars can’t properly evaluate this sort of evidence unless the recordings themselves are safely preserved and interested parties can reliably discover, access, and review them.  What if we don’t just want to take the OED at its word?  What if we want to double-check that “jazz” reference and make sure it’s legit?

Enter MDPI.  One of the 300,000+ items we’ve digitized so far is a copy, held by the Archives of Traditional Music, of Cal Stewart’s Uncle Josh in Society on a 78 rpm disc—the format the OED calls a “gramophone-record.”  We’ve been photographing the label of every 78 rpm disc we digitize, and in this case the label image reveals that the record is a product of the Victor Talking Machine Company with the catalog number 16145.

If you search by disc in the online Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR) with “Victor” as the label and “16145” as the catalog number, you’ll find it listed there with a release date of February 1909.

And if you listen to MDPI’s digital file of the Uncle Josh in Society side, you can hear the passage quoted in the OED for yourself:  “One lady asked me if I danced the jazz, and I told her no, I danced with my feet.”

Seem pretty conclusive?  Well, let’s not be too hasty.

Just by listening to the recording, you already know enough to reject one common mistake made by writers who haven’t listened to it.  Numerous sources claim that—to quote one example—“the word ‘jazz’ first appears in the lyrics of a 1909 song called Uncle Josh in Society.”  But in spite of a widespread assumption that sound recordings are all about music, Uncle Josh in Society isn’t a song.  It’s a story.  In fact, Cal Stewart—its performer and author—was the best-known phonographic storyteller of his time.  (You can read more about him in the album notes I wrote for a CD compilation of his work: The Indestructible Uncle Josh.)

And let’s dig a little deeper still.  It’s common knowledge that the “same” book can go through multiple revised editions, but people who would never confuse two editions of a book might not realize that a published sound recording such as Uncle Josh in Society can likewise exist in multiple versions with significant differences between them.  And that sometimes creates serious bewilderment.  Back in 1968, etymologist Peter Tamony notified historian Dick Holbrook of a reference to “jazz” he’d discovered while listening to Victor 16145.  A few years later, Holbrook wrote:

This would have been a most important documentation of the earliest proven use of the word jazz…except that the critical sentence, “One lady asked me if I danced the jazz….” is not on the record.  I have the record myself.  All the rest of the quoted monologue is there—but not the part about Jazz.  I’m afraid Peter Tamony got swindled on that and was reporting what somebody else told him.  But I assure you, dear reader, wherever else the word jazz might have been heard before 1910, it was not on any gramophone record.[2]

We’ve heard the word “jazz” on Victor 16145 for ourselves, but Holbrook seems awfully sure it isn’t there.  What gives?  The explanation, as you may have guessed, is that we’re dealing here with two different versions of Victor 16145, one of which contains the “jazz” reference, and one of which doesn’t.  Holbrook hadn’t established that the line couldn’t be heard on any copy of Victor 16145, but only that it couldn’t be heard on his copy.  That said, he was still on to something.

It’s true that Victor 16145 itself was first released in 1909.  However, the comic sketch Uncle Josh in Society was then already a decade old, having also appeared as Edison cylinder 3899 (in 1899), Victor single-faced disc 661 (in 1901), Columbia cylinder 14027 (in 1899), and Columbia single-faced disc 1489 (in 1903)—and that’s far from a complete list.  Moreover, Stewart performed it multiple times for most of these releases, often months or years apart, sometimes because of physical limits on the number of duplicates that could be made from each master recording, sometimes to take advantage of improvements in recording technology, and sometimes to accommodate different sizes of media (a seven-inch disc doesn’t run as long as a ten-inch disc).  Each recording of a different performance is called a “take,” and every take is unique.  Two takes of a given selection can be as dissimilar as any two editions of a book.

When we photograph the label of a 78 rpm disc at MDPI, we’re careful to use lighting that also allows the relief and intaglio markings in the area around the label to be clearly seen, since this space is comparable to the copyright page in a book in terms of the importance of the metadata it contains.  For example, the tiny number four visible at nine o’clock in the MDPI label image of Uncle Josh in Society is the “take number” and shows that our disc contains the fourth of several different takes.

If we now pull up the record for Victor 16145 in DAHR, we can see that the company used two different numbered takes when pressing it: two and four.  Take two was recorded on November 9, 1908, and must have been used for the first pressings sold starting in 1909.  That’s presumably the version Holbrook consulted, the one without the “jazz” line.  But Victor 16145 remained in the catalog until 1926.  And take four—the one we have, and the one Tamony must have had—wasn’t recorded until July 31, 1919, by which time the word “jazz” was in common use.

It seems Stewart had introduced the line about “jazz” to bring one of his older routines up to date when making a new recording of it,[3] prompting past investigators to mistake the new recording for the old one and to believe it was ten years older than it was.  Others have long since pointed this out,[4] and the online version of the OED now gives the correct (and unimpressive) date of 1919 for the “jazz” reference in Uncle Josh in Society.  But misinformation dies hard once it’s out there, and countless books, articles, and websites continue to report the 1909 citation as fact.

I bring this up because it’s a classic case of a mistake someone made while trying to use a sound recording in research—a mistake with significant and lasting consequences.  Bear in mind that it’s only one example of one particular type of mistake out of many I could have chosen.  But as Indiana University pursues its commitment to cultivating its rich audiovisual holdings as assets for research and teaching, it’s well worth our while to consider all the ways in which such endeavors can go awry and to brainstorm about how best to guard against them.

So what would it take, in this one concrete instance, to keep faculty and students from making the same catastrophic mistake?  Is accurate, comprehensive, intrusively conspicuous metadata the answer—and if so, will it be feasible to provide at scale?  Or is it a matter of fostering a community of well-informed users who know enough to work things out for themselves—and if so, how do we best do that?

[1] John Simpson and Edmund Weiner, ed., Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 8:204.
[2] Dick Holbrook, “Our Word JAZZ,” Storyville 50 (Dec. 1973-Jan. 1974): 46-58, at p. 50.
[3] In an older print version of Uncle Josh in Society, Stewart had instead written: “One lady wanted to know if I danced the german, but I told her I only danced in English.”  See Cal Stewart, Punkin Centre Stories (Chicago: Ryan Printing House, 1903), 24.
[4] David Shulman, “The Earliest Citation of Jazz,” in Studies in Slang, part II, ed. Gerald Leonard Cohen (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1989); 120-124.

By Darrell Myers, Post Production and Quality Control Manager – Film, Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative, Indiana University

Attendees of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) 28^th annual Archival Screening Night were treated to a unique look inside the MDPI film digitization process on November 29, 2018 at the Northwest Film Center in Portland, Oregon.

Limited to a Bolex, a tripod, a light meter, and 100 feet of Kodak 16mm B&W reversal film, Film Quality Control Specialist Charlie Allen captured the entire process of the film digitization phase of MDPI in three short minutes. The short film was shot “home movie style,” in chronological order and edited entirely in camera, similar to home movie collections now being digitized as part of the MDPI project.

Staff members from MDPI, Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive (IULMIA), and digitization partners Memnon (A Sony Company) all make appearances depicting a film’s journey through selection, preparation, scanning, quality control, restoration, and screening.

“MDPI Home Movie” was one of 25 entries selected to be screened at the event, alongside submissions from The Academy Film Archive, The George Eastman Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and other noted institutions.

by Dennis Cromwell, Executive Director, Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative, Indiana University

Thirteen years ago, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization declared October 27 as the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage. This day is celebrated to raise awareness of the need to “take urgent measures” to safeguard and preserve the world’s audio, video, and film heritage.

MDPI joins in global recognition of the importance of audiovisual preservation. In his 2013 State of the University address, Indiana University’s President Michael A. McRobbie emphasized the importance of preserving media within the context of the academy’s responsibility in preserving world knowledge. He charged the university community with preserving all significant audio, video, and film holdings for future generations.

IU launched the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative in 2015 to digitize and preserve over 325,000 assets by 2020, IU’s bicentennial year. This ambitious project encompasses work across 85 units, and will involve literally hundreds of people by the time it is completed in 2020.

We work with Memnon Archiving Services, a Sony company, in a public-private partnership to make this happen. Together, we are proud to be part of preserving AV heritage, and we are working hard to make as much of this content as publicly accessible as possible, within appropriate laws and ethical considerations. I recommend that you bookmark https://media.dlib.indiana.edu/ to track new content as it becomes accessible.

World Day for Audiovisual Heritage provides a great opportunity to impart our progress, and so we are pleased to announce that our digitized content currently consumes almost 10 petabytes of data storage representing over 270,000 hours of content from 310,000 audio, video, and film items. The executive sponsors, along with me, MDPI’s executive director, recently briefed the IU Board of Trustees on this remarkable progress. You are welcome to view a video of the presentation materials that describes the project and results, and highlights several important collections.

At IU, we take the preservation mission seriously. We hope that in 2018, many other universities will commit to protecting their important AV assets before degradation and obsolescence make preservation impossible. I look forward to seeing their progress posted on World Day for Audiovisual Heritage next year.

It is appropriate to conclude with a bit of Indiana heritage. We like to say that the game of basketball may have been invented in Massachusetts, but it took root in Indiana. This 1942 film aims to improve the basketball skills of young players and illustrates the state of the game in that era. I am sure its ultimate goal was to ensure the 1940 NCAA basketball championship was not IU’s last.

In Indiana, we are proud of basketball and proud of our role in preserving the world’s AV heritage.

by Patrick Feaster, Media Preservation Specialist, Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative, Indiana University 

If you spend much time exploring Google Books, you’ve surely seen your fair share of anomalies: stray images of workers’ hands, motion-blurred pages caught in the act of being turned, that sort of thing.  There’s a whole community of enthusiasts out there dedicated to finding, sharing, and enjoying these quirks, its most famous expression being a Tumblr blog called The Art of Google Books (“TAGB”).  Here at MDPI, of course, we’re digitizing time-based audiovisual media rather than books, but some useful analogies still exist between our work and the curiosities TAGB likes to collect.

Some TAGB finds are digitization errors, pure and simple: pages obviously aren’t supposed to be turned in mid-scan (or scanned in mid-turn), and workers’ hands are supposed to be kept discreetly out of sight.  Others, such as fold-out plates imaged while still folded, seem to reflect conscious policy—in that case, Google apparently instructs its workers not to unfold plates for scanning, which doesn’t produce a fully satisfactory digital surrogate but might still serve the limited goal of making books text-searchable.

We at MDPI spend much of our time and energy ensuring that the digital files we create don’t have problems like these.  Our QC program is designed to catch equivalents to pages scanned in mid-turn, while our digitization policies aim to capture all content optimally—including equivalents to fold-out plates.

But some other TAGB finds are the natural result of photographing the pages of a book with particular characteristics, and it’s this second kind of peculiarity—the “good” kind, if you will—that I’d like to focus on here.  The exhibits shown below aren’t mistakes, nor do they seem to be the result of intentionally cutting corners in the interests of efficiency.  They’re just part of the nature of the beast itself: not something to be avoided during digitization, but something to be understood, or misunderstood, during use.

What we’re seeing in these three cases might seem obvious, but let’s spell it out anyway:

1. An engraved portrait of Abraham Lincoln, protected by semi-opaque tissue paper, facing a title page which the ink from the engraving has discolored over time, creating a mirror image of it.
2. Two pages of different sizes bound together, causing parts of both to be visible simultaneously.
3. A library circulation slip—not originally part of the book, but later attached to it—stamped with the date due each time the book was checked out.

If these points seem too obvious to need explanation, that’s because we know from long experience how a book “works,” physically speaking: how it opens to display a pair of pages side by side, how it circulates in the context of a lending library, how new things can be pasted into or stamped onto it, and so on.   But what if we didn’t know these things?  Would our ability to use these digitized sources in research or teaching be diminished?

People have been predicting the demise of the traditional book for years—for just one fun example, see Octave Uzanne’s “The End of Books” (1894).  Somehow they’re still with us.  Still, it’s not too hard to imagine a future—say a hundred years hence—in which the average person has never handled a “real” book, and yet still has access to digital facsimiles of books through Google (or some distant corporate heir).  What’s still obvious to us now might not be obvious to readers then.  Would they recognize what’s going on with the portrait of Abraham Lincoln, or with the differently-sized pages, or with the library circulation slip?  For that matter, would they even understand what a book cover is, or why page numbers sometimes appear alternately in the left and right corners?  Maybe, maybe not—and it might or might not be important, depending on exactly what people are trying to study or teach.

But what might be true of books then is already true of many legacy audiovisual formats now, and we expect it eventually to become true of all the formats on MDPI’s plate.  Today, the average person has certainly never played a phonograph cylinder or projected an eight-millimeter film.  Can we make similar statements about audiocassettes and VHS tapes?  Probably—but even if we can’t now, we’ll be able to soon enough.  My point is that we’re pretty sure most future beneficiaries of MDPI’s digital files won’t have had first-hand experience using the source formats.  It’s true that researchers, educators, and students won’t always need to understand those formats in order to make effective use what they’re seeing or hearing.  But sometimes they will, just as they’ll sometimes need to know something about books to make sense of the views Google Books throws at them.

Obsolescence, then, doesn’t only threaten the survival of content itself.  It can also threaten people’s ability to make intelligent use of content after it’s been safely digitized—to know, among other things, how increasingly unfamiliar technologies are likely to have shaped content through the distinctive mechanisms for recording, editing, duplication, dissemination, presentation, and navigation they offered (or didn’t offer).

The threat obsolescence poses to the survival of content in legacy audio and video formats comes with a looming deadline: experts estimate that we have ten to fifteen years to preserve what we can through digitization.  By contrast, the challenge obsolescence poses to intelligibility will last for as long as the content itself does.

But it’s hard to describe that challenge in the abstract, so with this post we’re launching a new series to highlight specific examples of content we’ve digitized that require some media-archaeological background to understand or appreciate.  We hope you’ll find them interesting and informative.  Stay tuned.

by Casey Burgess, Intern, Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative, Indiana University

My name is Casey Burgess and I am an intern at MDPI. When I was asked to put together a “1 Second Everyday” video focusing on objects that MDPI has digitized, I was concerned with how to showcase objects. I definitely didn’t need to worry about that. Indiana University has such a broad collection of archives and libraries, which in turn have incredibly diverse collections with media that is interesting both in content and in terms of visual impact. In fact, I had trouble shortening the video because of how amazing many of these objects were! Through this video, I hope you catch a glimpse of the beauty and diversity of the objects we all work so hard to preserve.

by Carla Arton, Director of Technical Operations for Film, Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative, Indiana University

Last month the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative paused to celebrate three years of operation and industry leadership, much of which has been in tandem with Memnon Archiving – a Sony Company. Our mission, to digitally preserve Indiana University’s significant media collections to ensure long-term access for research and teaching, has led to the development of new technologies and workflows that will help museums and educational institutions save rapidly deteriorating recordings of historical events before they are lost forever. We have provided a model for making digital preservation of legacy media faster, higher quality, scaled-up, and easier to access.

After three years, we have a great deal to be thankful for: our institutional support, amazing staff and colleagues (both in and outside of IU), our vendors’ dedication to continued technological advancements, and our students and faculty whose growing use of these collections prove the impact on education that this initiative is making and will continue to make long-term.

Here are the numbers of digitized items as of August 21st, 2018.

• Open Reel Audio Tapes – 67,234 (50,000+ hours)
• Audiocassettes – 50,421 (59,000+ hours)
• VHS Tapes – 38,694 (65,000+ hours)
• LP Records – 38,621 (28,000+ hours)
• 78 RPM Records – 34,449 (3,600+ hours)
• Betacam Tapes – 18,803 (13,400+ hours)
• U-matic Tapes – 14,876 (9,000+ hours)
• CD-R – 11,850 (10,000+ hours)
• Digital Audio Tape – 8,996 (17,600+ hours)
• Film – 6,310 (1,700+ hours)
• Lacquer Discs – 4,112 (1,200+ hours)
• 45 RPM Records – 4,032 (500+ hours)
• Wax Cylinders – 3,997 (100+ hours)
• 1-Inch Open Reel Video – 3,758 (2,300+ hours)
• Betamax Tapes – 1,205 (1,900+ hours)
• 8mm Video – 929 (1,200+ hours)
• Aluminum Discs – 495 (50+ hours)
• Other Analog Sound Discs – 18 (16  hours)

Total Objects Digitized (as of 8/9/2018) – 308,760

Total Duration – 266,614 hours (that’s 11,109 days or over 30 years worth of content!)

Total Storage Space Used – 8.7 Petabytes

Daily Digitization Report courtesy of Brian Wheeler, Senior Systems Engineer, in IU Library Technologies.

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by Mike Casey, Director of Technical Operations, Audio/Video, Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative, Indiana University

Quality Control as Risk Management

In this post, I’ll continue exploring the quality control system developed for the audio/video side of the MDPI project. My earlier post on types of quality control ended with a discussion of risk-based QC. This is a type of quality control that involves identifying points of heightened risk among formats and digitization workflows so that more resources can be directed to them. In fact, the entire QC function of a media digitization operation may be conceptualized as an exercise in risk management. Quality control procedures must provide a reasonable level of confidence that the products of digitization meet expectations. However, we know that all human beings make mistakes, and therefore there is a risk that the human-run digitization operation will make mistakes. A useful definition of risk for our purposes is the chance or probability of a loss.

Risk in Media Digitization

The primary high-level risk within a media digitization operation is that it will produce digital files that do not meet an organization’s specification for preservation, and that these ‘bad’ files will be stored into the future as trusted preservation surrogates. More specifically, there is a risk that the digitization process itself will introduce errors into the files (loss of accuracy). There is also a risk that the work won’t be done optimally—that we will have ‘left something on the table’ that results in, generally speaking, audio that could have sounded better or video that could have looked better (loss of fidelity and accuracy). Further, there is a risk that errors will be introduced into the metadata that accompanies a recording (loss of context and interpretability).  Finally, there is a risk that the operation won’t digitally preserve an item at all because of a mistake in keeping track of recordings or files (loss of preservation).

The impact of these losses on future uses of the target content may be subtle or profound.  They can result in researchers using representations of content that are inaccurate or of lower quality than is possible, reaching false conclusions based on misleading or absent metadata, or not discovering content at all because it was not preserved.

These risks can be managed by the QC system in tandem with a robust quality assurance (QA) program.[1] Risk management may be defined as “the identification, assessment, and prioritization of risks followed by coordinated and economical application of resources to minimize, monitor, and control the probability and/or impact of unfortunate events.”[2] Classic risk management thinking identifies four basic areas in which an operation may respond to or treat risks:

1. Transfer the risk
2. Avoid the risk
3. Reduce or mitigate the risk
4. Accept the risk

Transferring Risk

Transferring the risk involves moving responsibility to another entity so that the impact to the organization carrying the risk is minimized or removed. A typical example is the use of insurance. The insurance company assumes specifically defined financial risks from a policy holder who pays a premium for this service. However, risk transfer may also be employed through a contract that contains an indemnity clause in which one party agrees to be financially responsible for specified liabilities that may be incurred by another party.

Within the audio/video part of the MDPI project, some risk is transferred to the digitization vendor through provisions of its contract with IU. The contract stipulates that the vendor is responsible for fixing all problems and re-digitizing as necessary at no cost to MDPI as long as those problems are reported within a fixed time period after digitization (40 days for audio and 30 days for video). This provision protects IU from mistakes made by the vendor as long as they are detected promptly.

Avoiding Risk

There are two ways in which an operation can avoid risk altogether: by choosing not to take whatever action exposes it to risk or by employing a resource that removes the risk.

Avoiding actions that result in greater risk is often not an option for media digitization operations. For example, the use of parallel transfer workflows is typically considered to carry greater risk than 1:1 workflows, although this is a complex question that is open to debate. It may not be a reasonable option for institutions with cost and time limitations to use only 1:1 workflows, which cost more and take more time, to digitize their collections. Similar issues may be found in specific workflow steps. Performing an azimuth adjustment as part of an audio tape digitization workflow adds significant risk—if not done well, the audio will be missing high frequencies. However, this step is essential to obtaining maximum fidelity and accuracy in the digital file and is considered mandatory.

There are, however, some areas in which risk can be successfully avoided. For example, MDPI removes risk by designing QC checks into its post-processing system. All files are handled by post-processing and therefore all are subject to this series of checks. A list of some of the QC checks performed by the post-processing system may be found in the earlier blog post on types of quality control. In this way, we remove practically all risk for the variables checked by the system. For example, all audio files are checked for bit depth. If the files are not 24 bit, they will be failed and the original recordings sent back to the vendor for re-digitization. There is no risk of inaccuracy since computers are quite capable of accurately checking this variable and every single file is checked.

Reducing Risk

Even when risk can’t be avoided altogether, the probability of loss can still be lessened by applying controls or taking particular actions.  With this in mind, MDPI has implemented a number of policies, procedures, and programs to reduce the risk that out-of-spec digital files will be placed into preservation storage. First, all fragile formats such as wax cylinders, lacquer discs, wire recordings, and ½” EIAJ videotapes are automatically routed to the 1:1 workflows used by the IU Media Digitization Studios (IUMDS) rather than the parallel transfer workflows used by the vendor. Playback of these formats typically requires constant attention, which can only be provided by an engineer digitizing one recording at a time. There is the added bonus that recordings in these formats tend to represent some of the highest value content for IU. This policy is more akin to a quality assurance step than a quality control check.

MDPI also implemented a human-intensive QC program to reduce risk. An MDPI staff member listens to or views files from a randomly selected sample of 10% of digitized recordings in order to judge their suitability for preservation storage. This part of the QC operation includes the use of Direct QC, value-based QC, and risk-based QC as described in the earlier post on types of QC.

Finally, MDPI has implemented a program to retrospectively select and perform focused QC on files created from some of IU’s highest-value recordings and collections to provide further assurance that they meet our specification. Our aim is to confirm that the most significant content owned by IU, as selected by curators from the media-holding units themselves, was digitized accurately.

Accepting Risk

Finally, we may choose to accept a risk that we consider tolerable, recognizing it and working with it in the interest of achieving a greater gain. For example, the IU Music Library holds some 38,000 open reel tape recordings of student and faculty recitals and concerts dating from the 1950s. While curatorial staff tell us that there are recordings of a number of prominent classical and jazz musicians interspersed within this collection, the majority of items are judged to be of moderate value. That is, they are valuable enough to justify digitization and long-term preservation but are not considered highly valuable. In addition, some of the most valuable tapes were digitized as part of an earlier project. Digitizing this collection using parallel transfer workflows may entail a greater risk than using 1:1 workflows. IU is willing to accept this risk rather than incurring the much higher cost of using 1:1 workflows to digitize this large collection.

The boundaries between these risk response procedures can be a little blurry. For example, transferring risk can also be thought of as a form of avoiding risk for the party that gave the risk to another entity. Also, reducing risk can imply accepting what is left of the risk after it is reduced.[3]

Conclusion

It is critical to acknowledge and confront the risks inherent in digitization work for the sake of future staff who must manage preserved content and for future researchers who must rely on the content for their inquiry. Although it is not possible to remove or reduce all risk associated with media digitization, it is feasible to manage risk through the QC system so that we have a high level of confidence that the products of digitization meet our specification. Using procedures for transferring, avoiding, reducing, and accepting risk enables us to find problems, prevent problems, reduce the likelihood that problems will occur, and understand areas in which a small number of problems are acceptable. All of this engenders trust in the output of the digitization process.

[1] Using definitions from the American Society for Quality, QC is a reactive process that consists of checking products for adherence to a specification. QA is a proactive process that consists of taking steps in advance to ensure that the product will meet the specification. For example, in a media digitization operation the QA program may provide guidelines or rules relating to personnel, training, type of equipment used, or other areas that impact the quality of the product to be produced. See http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/quality-assurance-quality-control/overview/overview.html

[2] Hubbard, Douglas W. The Failure of Risk Management: Why It’s Broken and How to Fix It. Page 4.

[3] Hubbard, Douglas W. The Failure of Risk Management: Why It’s Broken and How to Fix It. Chapter 2, Page 4.

by Mike Casey, Director of Technical Operations, Audio/Video, Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative, Indiana University

Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.

—Lin Yutang*

For the past year, I have ended the Why Media Preservation Can’t Wait presentation with this quote. I love its sense of the possibility (probability?) of emergence: we cannot see a path to take us where we want to go and yet, as we join with other like-minded collaborators, the road rises before us and becomes real. We can trust that it will appear both when we need it and when it is ready. Even with our current success digitizing media recordings at Indiana University, we had to walk our road into existence. It was not always apparent. Now, similar roads are appearing at other institutions whose libraries and archives preserve cultural heritage media materials like the New York Public Library, the University of North Carolina, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institute, Stanford University, and others. Each road is at least a little different in its twists, turns, and destination.

Walk on!

*Lin Yutang (1895-1976) was a Chinese writer, translator, linguist, philosopher, and inventor.

by Mike Casey, Director of Technical Operations, Audio/Video, Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative, Indiana University

At the ARSC conference a few weeks ago, I explored the quality control system we developed for the audio/video side of MDPI, including the different types of QC we use. At the highest level, we recognize two basic QC types: automated (machine-based) and manual (human-intensive). Automated QC is machine-based and carried out by software tools, while human-intensive QC is a manual process that relies on the human senses of sight and sound as well as on our capacity for logic and reasoning. These may seem like very different strategies, but in truth, the two types of QC make use of each other. For example, human cognition is necessary to interpret the software output of machine-based QC while machines must render the digital files that are analyzed using sight and sound.

Automated machine-based QC routines may use commercial, open source, and/or homegrown applications. For MDPI, we developed our own scripts with which we analyze 100% of the files produced by the project. This is part of the MDPI post-processing system, and it includes checks in the following areas, among others:

• presence/absence of digital provenance metadata
• presence/absence of specific embedded metadata
• directory and file names
• presence of expected file types (preservation master, production master, etc.) for the format digitized
• format and wrapper
• file extension
• audio stream count
• sample rate, bit depth, codec name, frame rate, pixel format
• duration across streams and across file types

Human-intensive QC, on the other hand, features an MDPI staff member listening to and/or viewing digital files to judge the accuracy of characteristics that are typically not assessed well by machines. For example, open reel audio tapes recorded in the field occasionally exhibit problems like reversed audio or changes in speed. These issues cannot be accurately discovered by machine. Nor can the problem of mixed up audio/video content and its corresponding metadata that obviously and mistakenly refer to different recordings.

Project resources allow us to undertake human-intensive QC for approximately 10% of the recordings digitized by MDPI. To maximize our resources we employ the following strategies, all of which we define as different types of human-intensive QC:

1. Value-based QC—directing more QC resources to formats, collections or recordings that are considered of higher value and fewer to those deemed less valuable. For example, the project digitized a limited number of commercial LPs and 45s. IU curators told us that, while these were valuable enough to digitize, they were significantly less valuable than other formats. In their estimation, directing fewer QC resources to these formats in order to make available resources for more in-depth checking of valuable formats was worth the risk.
2. Risk-based QC—analyzing digitization workflows and digitized formats to identify where risk is greater and directing more resources to those areas. For example, we define the time period in which something new is started or something is changed as carrying greater risk. Therefore, when the digitizing operation begins a new format, hires a new person, or begins using a new machine, the QC operation will allocate additional QC resources for a specific period of time to mitigate the risk.

It is also useful to analyze a digitization workflow to define workflow steps or procedures that may carry greater risk. The azimuth adjustment step in an open reel audio tape or audiocassette workflow, for example, is somewhat subjective and relies upon the judgement and accuracy of the operator. The only way to check this step is to compare digital files to playback of the digitized recording. This prompted us to implement another type of quality control that we call Direct QC in order to assess this variable. Direct QC compares part of the digitized recording directly to the corresponding part of the digital file that was created during digitization to assess the accuracy of the azimuth step as well as other workflow steps and choices.

There is much more to say about quality control for media digitization operations. Look for future posts about the MDPI QC operation.