Preservation

Marcos Sueiro Bal, audio engineer, Alan Lomax Archive.

A principal mission of the Association for Cultural Equity is to preserve and disseminate intangible cultural heritage resources. After Alan Lomax's retirement in 1996 ACE assumed the care of his vast library of ethnographic documentation, and in 1997 began the preservation of his legacy of sound recordings, photographs and videos, films, field journals, correspondence, and research projects. Keeping pace with advancements in preservation technology and practice, this work was carried out in three phases — physical preservation, digital reformatting, and digital management.

Physical Preservation
The Society of American Archivists defines preservation as "the professional discipline of protecting materials by minimizing chemical and physical deterioration and damage to minimize the loss of information and to extend the life of cultural property." The first phase of ACE's preservation effort focused on stabilizing physical items " photographs, tapes, discs, videos, and selected manuscripts. The Library of Congress has acquired the original physical elements of Alan Lomax's archive and will continue with the process of physical preservation.

Digital Reformatting
Digital reformatting preserves the original item by allowing unlimited access, duplication, and dissemination without damage to the original. In combination, these two phases of preservation afford the highest level of protection to original materials.

Between 1999 and 2007, ACE built a digital collection that mirrors Lomax's physical collection. Following standards prescribed by the Library of Congress and the National Recording Preservation Board, ACE used up-to-date capturing techniques and metadata and storage formats. Corresponding database catalogs containing descriptive and administrative metadata were developed for each digital collection.

Audio tapes at the Alan Lomax Archive, New York, 2004.

Digital Preservation / Electronic Data Management
Analog media requires physical stabilization and use typically leads to damage — the more an item is used, the more it deteriorates. With proper storage conditions, minimal maintenance ensures the long-term survival of analog materials. In contrast electronic information requires continual use to prevent information loss and obsolescence. One can't shelve electronic media in ideal storage conditions and expect it to remain intact. Formats and carriers become obsolete, and data develop high rates of error. Therefore, the third phase of ACE's preservation strategy focuses on forward migration, redundancy, and replacement of its digital collections utilizing RAID redundant digital hard-drive storage and Sony AIT-3 compressed digital tapes. We continually explore other efficient, cost-effective means for long-term electronic data management.