Data and information from sound archives: the experience at the sound archive of University of Aveiro

• Autor(a) principal: Duarte, Andreia
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/35709
• topic: Data; Information; Sound archives; Organization of knowledge

Sound archives in Portugal are in an underdeveloped state, and have been a topic of debate since the early 2000’s. The archives that contain once commercial records only exist thanks to the aid of collectors and musicians. For the past twenty years, researchers, universities and research centers have been receiving, studying, and aiding their digital preservation, establishing protocols with their owners and rightsholders towards making sound archives more accessible for research and contributing to the safeguard of social memories through institutionalization. The complex web of factors that has been contributing towards this underdeveloped state of archives turned even more notorious in the digital era. These factors are: the legislations for heritage, copyright, and authorship which aren’t yet adapted to these archives’ needs; the transversal and structural national underinvestment in sound archives; the specificities that involve each type of sound record, which contributes to ethical and technical concerns; the scattered information about these records; how to digitally represent and classify them. While we are still facing seminal questions about our sound archives and their digital preservation, their digital accessibility, and the data we produce upon them as researchers is also at a risk. While authorship rights might represent a hold towards their open access, the data we produce as researchers may help grant a safe and open haven for the memories they contain, especially in the face of the current indications towards open science and open data. This communication will be centered on the experience I’ve been having as a researcher at the sound archives of University of Aveiro, studying and cataloguing shellac records. I will focus on 1) what type of data is extracted from the records and added to them; 2) the challenges found in the preservation of information; 3) how certain institutionally adopted norms are being adapted to fit the description of sound documents; 4) how the organization of data by researchers is fundamental to adhere to the open science/ open data directions.