areisemann / Industrial-History-Archives

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Digital Archive: Data Curation and Maintenance #12

Open areisemann opened 8 years ago

areisemann commented 8 years ago

I've been making a strong push on the data preservation/curation front over the last several weeks. Although I've been needing to do the maintenance, the current progress is entirely due to my core DJ nature/impulses: I have to be sure the music that I want to spin this Friday night up in Chicago will be ready and burned to my shiny new stack of 50 blank CDs.

As a result of my fervor for making sure that 1) all the albums that I'll possibly want will be at my fingertips and 2) the music will be playable by whatever mixer I'm gonna have to use on Friday, I've worked on cleaning up the various folders of Misato's audio collection. This has involved a lot of researching, identifying, standardizing, quality control, relocating/reorganizing, and a bunch of other activities that just eat up time.

It also led to me wishing yet again for a single or centralized information authority for industrial record labels, bands, band members/musicians, albums/releases, etc. It's bad enough that the information on Discogs doesn't always match what a record label's site does, but one also has to deal with: absent or conflicting information on bands record labels' wikipedia pages, band-generated discogs, fan-created discogs, other record labels' discogs, distributors'/vendors' discogs, and so forth. And then, sometimes, you run into further incongruencies when you compare the metadata against the identifying information on an album's original physical container. sigh

Incidentally, if I haven't already noted: Misato (one of my desktops) is the major hub for my digital archiving activities. Among these, I use it as a staging ground for digitizing materials, burning accession CDs, testing new tools/software, and updating web content.

Additionally, I use it to process and arrange audio files of both the DJ special collection and the general archive.

And, I've also been using it as long-term, yet non-permanent storage for all of the IHA's digital materials (e.g. audio, photographic, text, video). The long-term, permanent storage is on the external drive NeNe.