The William and Gayle Cook Music Library has had a long tradition of audio digitization. Starting in the early 1990s, staff at the Cook Music Library began discussing and developing the first-ever Digital Music Library, the Variations System. In anticipation of that system and ever since, many of the Music Library's recordings have been digitized for access via the Variations System. Of course there is a dramatic difference between digitization for access (especially those done in the 1990s!) and digitization for preservation. In 2007, in conjunction with Johns Hopkins University, we engaged in the "Digital Audio Archives Project" that set out to develop software to facilitate digitization of materials like those held here in the Cook Music Library. Thanks to that grant we were able to hire our first audio preservation engineer who began preserving recordings in the Jacobs School of Music's Archive of recorded performances.

These performances span nearly every analog audio format from the late 1930s until the 1990s. In the 90s, audio engineers at the Jacobs School began recording to Digital Audio Tape and ultimately CD-R. We began ingesting born-digital content from the Jacobs School shortly after the Digital Audio Archives Project began in 2007.

As the Digital Audio Archives Project wrapped up, we had preserved approximately 1,000 of our analog recordings. These were carefully chosen by librarians who were familiar with the collection and sought to preserve those that seemed to have the greatest research value either with regards to special repertoire (premieres or works by well-known contemporary composers) or recordings of luminary faculty or students who have gone on to exemplary careers. However, 1,000 or so was a mere drop in the bucket out of a collection of approximately 200,000 sound recordings. Thus we sought to keep our preservation engineer on after the end of the grant. This of course required a sales pitch to Deans. A report was presented to both the Dean of Libraries and Dean of the Jacobs School of Music. To accompany that report we had our engineer prepare a few examples of both the kind of work he was doing and the difference a professional audio engineer, doing true digital preservation, brought to the archive compared to the access digitization done by students previously. I'll let some of his examples speak for themselves.

There was no question that a trained audio engineer who knew how to handle the various types and brands of open reel tape, how to bake and prepare tapes, and calibrate equipment made a dramatic difference in what we would accomplish.

The same is true for the expertise we have with our partnership with Memnon and with our colleagues staffing the IU preservation facility. The case we made successfully to Deans at the time was about quality, but we were not addressing quantity. With our one engineer we estimated it would take approximately 100 years to get all of our analog recordings digitized. Thus our delight with the current MDPI project which will preserve all of the important recordings from our archive.

Prior to the MDPI, upon learning that we had hired an audio preservation engineer in the music library, I received a frequent question from colleagues at other institutions. Was it worth it? What was the cost/benefit? A colleague at a well-respected institution with a fine music school said that after learning what we were doing, he too considered preserving their local performance recordings, but in the end they decided that their collection wasn't worth the cost of preserving it. While I think that was a huge error, I was also gratified that it was an easy answer for me to rattle off the names of some of our luminary faculty, such as Janos Starker, Menahem Pressler, David Baker, Josef Gingold, Andre Watts and student recitals by Joshua Bell, Sylvia McNair, Michael and Randy Brecker, Edgar Meyer and many more, nearly all of whose performances were contained on single tapes that, if they became unplayable, would be lost forever. We are thrilled that the MDPI project will culminate with us achieving what started as a 100-year dream.

Philip Ponella
Wennerstrom-Phillips Music Library Director
William and Gayle Cook Music Library