Digital Preservation in the United States Marine Band Evan Sonderegger SSgt, USMC

Who we are

What’s in our archives

Audio –20,000+ files –70+ days in duration –Growing at a rate of about 60 hours/year Video –Only went HD in 2011 –Already twice as large as all our audio assets Photos Concert Programs, promotional materials

How we got in to digital preservation In 2000, concert recordings transitioned from DAT to CD-R In 2007, we noticed many of those early CD-R recordings had unrecoverable errors Digitization effort began with high-risk and high-value recordings We didn’t know what we were doing. We just knew we needed to do something.

How we store stuff 4 Netgear ReadyNAS RAID-5 arrays –Two primary, two backup, using rsync MimsyXG running on Oracle 11g database Reference web server –Ubuntu Server –Running on PowerMac G5 –Connected to the world via cable modem

Audio –Preservation.wav files named by DB accession number “best available” 16/24 bit, 44.1/96kHz –Access.mp3 (LAME –v 2) Generated automatically with id3 tags from master database by a series of scripts Video –Preservation ProRes 422 for HD content.iso image file of DVD for SD Content –Access 800 kbps h.264 with AAC audio stored in a mp4 wrapper

What we’ve learned Done is better than perfect. A good access system makes justifying resources for digital preservation much easier. Video is hard. Mangled diacritics are a good warning sign that you’re doing something wrong. We still have a lot to learn.

Where we’d like to be doing better Coordinating with other government institutions Data integrity and provenance Preservation of non audio-visual assets –Calendar information –Organizational

Thanks! (questions?)