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BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (AP) — An effort to convert significant Indiana University audio and video recordings from analog to digital appears to be ahead of schedule.
The Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative aims to save 280,000 recordings by the university's bicentennial celebration in 2020, the Herald-Times (http://bit.ly/2aaBUfL ) reported.
Early estimates projected the entire process would take 15 years, said Laurie Antolovic, the project's director. But in just a year, more than 100,000 of those recordings have been converted.
The early estimates were based off the university's one-to-one transfer method. But it has since found a faster way to digitize the recordings through Memnon Archiving Services, a Brussels-based company.
Memnon has been digitizing, restoring and preserving the audio-visual content at the university's Innovation Center, which was converted into a digitalization factory.
The company can convert about 600 recordings generating 2,700 files, or about nine terabytes of data, per day, according to Andrew Dapuzzo, director of U.S. operations for Memnon. One terabyte is about 2,000 hours of CD-quality recordings.
The recordings include moments such as legendary composer Hoagy Carmichael's 1949 concert at the IU Auditorium and phonographs for field recordings of tribal music from the 1890s.
Mike Casey, director of technical operations for the preservation initiative, estimates that in the next 15 years, such analog recording will either deteriorate to the point that it's impossible to play them back or be too expensive to make it practical to digitize them.
"All analog media is degrading and becoming obsolete," Casey said. "We have a narrow window of opportunity to take action."
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Information from: The Herald Times, http://www.heraldtimesonline.com
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