Long-term preservation of sound and audiovisual documents needs particular skills and infrastructure. It generates continuously high costs. Therefore, before accepting sound and audiovisual documents for long-term preservation an institution should verify if its mission permits it to do so and if there are sufficient trained personnel, adapted infrastructure and financial means in the long term budget. If this is not the case, the documents should be handed over to a better adapted institution.
If there is no legal obligation to keep a collection as a whole, a process of appraisal, prioritisation and selection should be carried out. (See the “IASA Task Force on Selection” document1).
Many professional activities of archivists are covered in documents related to the codes of ethics of organizations of archivists and librarians. Good examples are the codes of ethics of the Society of American Archivists1 and the International Council on Archives2.
Certainly important to IASA is an ethical approach to appraising sound and audiovisual materials. The ICOM code of ethics3 is relevant here, especially sections on the care of collections, 2.18-2.26 (regarding the policies to ensure the continuity and security of collections and associated data, documentation, conservation, and professional responsibility).
In accordance with these ethical principles, sound and audiovisual recordings and associated materials (including original carriers) shall be treated with appropriate respect and mishandling by unskilled operators should be avoided. They need to be conserved according the latest technology to minimise deterioration. Their original content and physical representation shall be safeguarded from being modified, truncated, extended, falsified or censored in any way.
Archivists’ obligations also include the permanent care of accompanying materials (photographs, notes, etc.) and the handling of the description of the contents of the recordings (for metadata, catalogues and discography, and other publications).
Collection activities include more than just acquisition. All archives also dispose of recordings removed from the collections. While deaccessioning is done for a variety of reasons, as described in the ICOM document noted above (paragraphs 2.12-2.17), archivists need to observe paragraph 2.13:
The removal of an object or specimen from a museum collection must only be undertaken with a full understanding of the significance of the item, its character (whether renewable or non-renewable), legal standing, and any loss of public trust that might result from such action.
This is important, for example, in cases where a recordist has promised a performer that recordings would be preserved in an archive, or when an archive has promised a depositor that his or her collection would remain intact.
1. see http://www.archivists.org/governance/handbook/app_ethics.asp
2. see http://www.ica.org/sites/default/files/Ethics-EN.pdf
3. see http://icom.museum/the-vision/code-of-ethics/2-museums-that-maintain-col...
The IASA Technical Committee document, TC03 The Safeguarding of the Audio Heritage: Ethics, Principles and Preservation Strategy Version 3, of December 2005, specifically proposes ethical considerations for technical processing and preservation of audio recordings. In this publication the valid distinction between content and carrier is drawn, and consideration is given to technical responsibilities, and consequences of actions in technical preservation practices. TC03 is available at http://www.iasa-web.org/safeguarding-audio-heritage-ethics-principles-pr....
Any kind of preservation, restoration, transfer and migration and of sound and audiovisual content should be done in such a way as to avoid or minimize the loss of data and other relevant information on the original recording. In addition, ancillary information, which may be part of the original sound or AV document (i.e., content and carrier) in manifold forms, should be safeguarded. The original carriers should be preserved in useable condition for as long as is feasible. This also applies to all digitized materials, since the technology and methods of signal extraction and analogue-digital-transfer are still subject to further development, and original carriers – and packaging – often provide ancillary information.
TC03 states that eventually the content of any sound recording intended to be retained indefinitely will need to be transferred to a long term storage system, however, as local conditions may affect the process, any such procedure “should follow a strategy based on the individual situation of the collection and the specific policy of an archive” (TC03, p.11). Prioritisation and selection for digitisation should follow the selection criteria developed by the IASA “Task Force to establish selection criteria of analogue and digital audio contents for transfer to data formats for preservation purposes” 1.
Any kind of physical restoration process on the original carrier should be performed with utmost care to balance the possible improvement of restoration against possible further deterioration or subsequent damage in the long time preservation (see TC03, chapter 6). Any kind of physical restoration process on the original carrier should be performed according to the actual best practice (see IASA-TC04 "Guidelines on the Production and Preservation of Digital Audio Objects”, 2nd edition, 2009, individual chapters: http://www.iasa-web.org/audio-preservation-tc04).
Transfers made from old to new archive formats should be carried out without subjective signal alterations. Any kind of subjective signal enhancement (like de-noising, etc.) must only be applied on a copy of the unmodified archival transfer (e.g. on access copies, see TC03, chapters 7-8).
All preservation actions, restoration, transfer and migration processes (including long-term digital storage procedures), should always be accompanied by careful documentation, in order to provide all relevant specifications that ensure the authenticity of the primary data and prevent the loss of primary, secondary, and contextual information constituted by the original AV document. Technicians working in an archival preservation setting must ensure that they document any alterations of sounds and audiovisual data done for other specific purposes such as types of dissemination.
Technicians whose work involves the creation of information systems for cataloguing sound and audiovisual collections should also avoid data loss in those systems.