The National Recording Preservation Plan is a strategic guide for the preservation of sound recordings in the United States. It was published in December 2012 by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the National Recording Preservation Board of the Library of Congress. The plan was written by a community of specialists, but is prominently credited to Brenda Nelson-Strauss, Alan Gevinson and Sam Brylawski
Background In 2000, Congress passed the "National Recording Preservation Act", which established the National Recording Preservation Foundation and the National Recording Preservation Board. In 2010, this board published a document titled "The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States", which identified legal and technical factors that contribute to the loss of sound recordings. The National Recording Preservation Plan can be considered a response to the challenges identified in this study.
Content After a foreword by the Librarian of Congress and an executive summary, the plan is divided into four major sections: Building the National Sound Recording Preservation infrastructure, Blueprint for implementing preservation strategies, Promoting broad public access for educational purposes and Long-term national strategies.
Building the National Sound Recording Preservation infrastructure This section calls for increased infrastructure to support audio preservation, including more and better storage facilities, education programs, a directory of resources, and a formal agenda for further research.
Physical and digital infrastructure Sound recordings on physical media require specific conditions to slow the inevitable degradation of the carriers. Facilities that can accomplish these conditions are expensive to create and maintain, so the plan recommends fundraising for the creation of such facilities and consortial funding and use between smaller institutions.
The need for professional preservation reformatting (digitization) facilities is similar, and the plan suggests similar strategies for increased reformatting in the following section - increased in-house services where feasible, collaboration where necessary, and, possibly, expansion of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center to allow nonprofit third parties to use their facilities or their services.
Best practices for the archival storage of digital information call for sophisticated networks of storage and curation to ensure the data persist and remain accessible. Few archives currently meet these standards, and there is little research toward the specific needs of audio data. In this section, the plan challenges readers to devise innovative strategies to create and share repositories, and to continue to improve digital storage through research.
Education and professional training Audio preservation is not a new discipline, but has traditionally been carried out by personnel with various disparate professional backgrounds. Audio engineers, archivists and librarians, computer scientists, and subject specialists in music, history and folklore (to name a few) have all made important contributions to the practice and literature. There has not, however, traditionally been uniform training in audio preservation. This part of the plan calls for the development of professional educational programs in audio preservation that balance the knowledge of the fields above and would prepare individuals to perform, or at least understand, the many skills required to accomplish this work.
This education will require the identification of and participation by those institutions with the requisite human and technical resources, or the development of these faculties at interested institutions. With these programs in place, funding and internships and fellowships will further allow prospective students to seamlessly enter the field.
In addition to primary education in audio preservation, the next sections call for continuing education for working professionals, and a resource directory that compiles information about educational programs, working professionals and organizations, best practices, general literature, funding institutions, and more. This document, called the Audio Preservation Resource Directory, is frequently referred to throughout the remainder of the plan.
National technology research agenda Much research has been done on the attributes and failures of sound media, and best practices in archival transfer, but much more research, such as new methods of transfer, new treatments to deteriorating audio carriers, and new methods of digital storage, is expected to yield promising results in the near future. This research will require collaboration between government, academia and industry in order to leverage existing competencies and avoid duplication of effort.
Much of the information about legacy equipment and skills is held only by senior archivists and engineers who will eventually retire. Recommendation 1.8 suggests readers practice 'knowledge management' by conducting video interviews with senior staff. Any other information held in schematics or equipment manuals should be similarly documented and archived.
Blueprint for implementing preservation strategies This section emphasizes the need for a consensus of best practices in the variety of tasks that constitute the audio preservation practice, as well as the need for tools and guidelines for the management of digital audio.
Audio preservation management Acknowledging the imminence of many audio preservation projects, the insufficiency of funding for this type of work, and the lack of formally trained professionals in many smaller institutions, recommendation 2.1 calls for the development of a handbook that presents best practices in audio preservation in simple, practical terms. Such a guide would act as an approachable lesson in best practices for personal collectors or smaller institutions.
The next recommendation demonstrates the need for assessment of collections in prioritizing work and generating funding. Assessment can be performed by third-party consultants, or by existing staff with the help of assessment tools, some of which exist, and some that still need to be developed.
Somewhat in alignment with the handbook described above, recommendation 2.3 encourages partnerships between institutions of different types (private vs. public), sizes, finances and goals (etc.). An example of this might be a non-profit community radio station working with a university to store or transfer an important collection of radio program transcriptions that the station would not be able to handle on its own.
New tools and guidelines for preserving digital audio files Although digital audio is often perceived as the 'destination' of audio preservation activity, it is more accurately a halfway point. Digital transfers of legacy audio and born-digital audio must be actively maintained to ensure continued preservation and accessibility. Some foresight in the production of digital audio can facilitate these goals moving forward.
Recommendation 2.4 encourages successful institutions to share the tools and strategies that allowed them to create useful digital audio objects. While these will certainly vary project to project and institution to institution, some strategies may be widely or universally better than others, and these should be identified and communicated.
One of the universally beneficial features of digital audio is metadata. While specific schema will vary widely, all digital audio should include technical metadata about the production of the audio, descriptive metadata about the content of the audio, and structural metadata about the relationships between audio files and related objects. Standardization of these metadata schemas encourages interoperability between organizations and facilitates access and future data curation and migration.
One of the best ways to ensure interoperability, in metadata and beyond, is to use and promote software and tools that adhere to established standards. Some commercial software and tools are built with this functionality, and some can be modified or extended to permit it. Open source software is sometimes more flexible than commercial. This recommendation may seem to apply only to software engineers, but managers and archivists must be aware of these considerations and choose tools with them in mind.
Not all digital audio is transferred from analog carriers. In recent years, digital recording has mostly replaced analog technologies, and some digital audio is produced entirely in the digital realm (electronic music, MIDI, etc.). These files are often considered to be at equal risk to those on deteriorating analog media because of the lack of standardization, and obsolescence of proprietary software used to produce the recordings. Awareness of these issues among archives and promotion of awareness among musicians and producers may help identify which formats will require attention, and prompt research into emulating legacy software or migrating proprietary data.
Promoting broad public access for educational purposes This section begins to address the ways in which preservation is interdependent with access. Complicated intellectual property laws prevent audio archives from making most recordings publicly available, and funding agencies are reluctant to fund initiatives that don't improve access to materials. The following recommendations seek to improve public access to information that can be legally distributed, advocate for copyright reform, and streamline legal avenues for access to copyrighted works for educational use.
Discovery and cataloging initiatives Widespread public access to recordings is an admirable goal for archives, but is unrealistic in most cases considering current copyright policy. There are many ways that archives can improve access to their collections, however, without risking legal action or offense to rights holders.
Recommendation 3.1 suggests the development and consolidation of discographies into a comprehensive national discography that would simplify the tracking of rights ownership. Although many decades of research have produced satisfactory discographies of individual record labels and musical forms, consolidation could improve usefulness through standardization, community annotation, and interoperability with existing collection catalogs and finding aids. Inclusion of commercially published discographies will be licensed with their respective publishers.
If a consolidated discography would bring together all published recordings into a single resource, a national directory of existing sound collections might compile information about existing collections at a fraction of the time, expense and effort of the discography. Audio holdings in existing collections, and even entire audio collections can be completely invisible to scholars without representation or community involvement. Recommendation 3.2 requests a directory of existing collections of all types, contact information for representatives, and descriptions of subject or format strengths. This directory may help facilitate partnerships as described in recommendation 2.3.
Just as standardized metadata helps people discover digital audio objects (recommendation 2.5), cataloging libraries' and archives' holdings of physical audio objects (and related materials) helps their respective constituents discover their materials better. Copy (shared) cataloging between institutions requires a consensus on what information must be included in a catalog record. This discussion should be undertaken publicly, and the results shared and distributed as best practices.
Copyright legislation reform "Copyright reform...remains the key solution to preserving America's recorded sound history, protecting ownership rights, and providing public access"