Background
During the Archival Sound Recordings project (2004-2009) the British Library digitised tens of thousands of recordings of music, spoken word and environmental sounds from the British Library Sound Archive.
The project was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) under its Digitisation Programme.
The first phase of the project, ASR1, ran from 2004 to 2007 and provided 12,000 recordings online to licensed UK higher and further education institutions. The second phase, ASR2, ran from 2007 to 2009, increasing the number of recordings to over 30,000 and, where rights permitted, extending access to many recordings to anyone.
Standards
- the delivery of metadata
- digitisation of audio and images
- the development of the web interface
Metadata:
Having evaluated the various standards for the encoding and delivery of metadata, the Library decided to employ the XML-based Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS).
METS can incorporate many disparate kinds of information in a single record or group of records while providing a consistent archival structure. For instance, METS can contain legacy information about the archival original while also documenting the process of digitisation and audio segmentation, together with the provision of standard descriptive data encoded in Dublin Core.
The descriptive data has been delivered as the British Library Application Profile for Sound (BLAP-S).
An Archival Sound Recordings METS profile has been created specifically for archival audio. This profile may be reused by other projects.
The ASR website contains many oral history interviews, some over 40 hours long. These interviews have been segmented for accessibility, but have been presented in such a way that the user can easily locate all the other parts of the interview, as well as their descriptions.
The ASR website is fully compliant with the Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), allowing third-party projects to provide access to the ASR files. Please contact asr@bl.uk if you would like to access the mechanism for harvesting metadata from the site.
Digitisation:
Standards used for audio digitisation follow the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives’ Guidelines on the Production and Preservation of Digital Audio Objects (IASA TC-04; second edition, 2009).
Web interface:
For more information on standards used in ASR please see: