About the Course

Welcome to the Fundamentals of Audio Preservation online course, presented by Indiana University's Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative. This course explores the basics of preserving archival audio holdings. Participants will develop practical, hands-on (and ears-on!) capabilities in a number of areas including critical listening, embedding metadata, and quality control. If you work with archival audio in any setting, from a large sound archive to a small number of recordings in a manuscripts repository, this course will provide you with the tools to develop a sound preservation plan.

This course is designed for archivists, librarians, students, and others who will manage or are managing audio digitization projects for long-term preservation. It is not designed to meet the deeper technical needs of digitization engineers or operators who are performing the work of playing and digitizing audio recordings. Technical audio issues in the course are covered at a beginner's level.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Apply principles, standards, and best practices to preserve audio recordings.
• Evaluate various audio formats to identify preservation problems and characteristics that impact stability.
• Resolve technical issues in the audio preservation space.
• Manage audio preservation transfer work conducted either in-house or using an outside vendor.