Digital Preservation in the United

States Marine Band

Evan SondereggerSSgt, USMC

evan.sonderegger@usmc.mil

Who we are

What’s in our archives

• Audio– 20,000+ files– 70+ days in duration– Growing at a rate of about 60 hours/year

• Video– Only went HD in 2011– Already twice as large as all our audio

assets

• Photos• Concert Programs, promotional

materials

How we got in to digital preservation

• In 2000, concert recordings transitioned from DAT to CD-R

• In 2007, we noticed many of those early CD-R recordings had unrecoverable errors

• Digitization effort began with high-risk and high-value recordings

• We didn’t know what we were doing. We just knew we needed to do something.

How we store stuff

• 4 Netgear ReadyNAS RAID-5 arrays– Two primary, two backup, using rsync

• MimsyXG running on Oracle 11g database

• Reference web server– Ubuntu Server 10.04– Running on PowerMac G5 – Connected to the world via cable

modem

• Audio– Preservation

• .wav files named by DB accession number• “best available” 16/24 bit, 44.1/96kHz

– Access• .mp3 (LAME –v 2)• Generated automatically with id3 tags from

master database by a series of scripts

• Video– Preservation

• ProRes 422 for HD content• .iso image file of DVD for SD Content

– Access• 800 kbps h.264 with AAC audio stored in a mp4

wrapper

What we’ve learned

• Done is better than perfect.• A good access system makes

justifying resources for digital preservation much easier.

• Video is hard.• Mangled diacritics are a good warning

sign that you’re doing something wrong.

• We still have a lot to learn.

Where we’d like to be doing better

• Coordinating with other government institutions

• Data integrity and provenance• Preservation of non audio-visual

assets– Calendar information– Organizational email

Thanks! (questions?)