Metadata for Phonograph Records
Facilitating New Forms of Use and Access to Analog Sound Recordings
Although analogue phonograph recordings (LPs) have long shelf lives, there are many reasons for initiating research into proper procedures for their digital preservation. Due to the enormous quantity of existing recordings and the time required to digitize them faithfully, an efficient and economical workflow management system for digital conversion is necessary in order to facilitate long-term conservation and provide new forms of use and access to analogue sound recordings.
A new metadata schema for describing sound recordings has been designed as part of the overall digitization management system being developed. This schema was created to the finest level of granularity possible to provide various functionalities in the context of a digital library. The schema includes five types of metadata: description metadata to enable discovery and identification of resources; administration metadata to support management of resources; structure metadata to describe font and layout characteristics of texts; legal rights metadata to protect intellectual property rights; and technical information metadata to record the capture process and technical characteristics of digital objects.
Using the metadata schema, a web data-entry form was implemented to facilitate the encoding of the metadata elements and was tested on David Edelberg's Handel LP collection housed in McGill University's Marvin Duchow Music Library. A preliminary web site was developed to facilitate easy information retrieval of the digital collection of Handel LPs. It is hoped that with other LP digitization projects, this metadata schema will be tested more widely and improved in the near future.
© Copyright 2005 Catherine Lai, Ichiro Fujinaga, and Cynthia A. Leive