Voices of the Patagonia Austral: digital sound preservation

Most information and artistic output are currently recorded in digital format. The preservation of this material gives rise to new problems for keeping it able to be used and available, since the technologies to store it are replaced by new and more powerful generations incompatible with the previous ones. In the last years discussions about development for the preservation of digital patrimony are taking place in certain regions in the world, especially in English-speaking areas, whereas development in Latin America still is scarce.
This project entails the production of strategies aimed to the preservation of digital sound patrimony in the Patagonia Argentina region, considering urgency level, local circumstances, available media and future planning.
The work in collaboration with the Municipal Archives of the province of Santa Cruz provides the knowledge acquired due to the interchange as well as potential benefits from sustainability according to inter-institutional agreements and the establishment of shared standards in order to obtain inter-operability among programs or based on a same comprehension of the most helpful practices to reach the desired preservation objectives.
The discussion on nodal topics focused on: i- definition of a vision centred in management processes for patrimony preservation and selection of what is worthy of visit; ii- the control taking of materials, i.e., identification and description as well as aspects for managing rights; iii- data protection; iv- ways to keep media for access.
The methodology proposal of collaborative work was based on the combination of an analytic-descriptive perspective and a normative-application perspective. Three were the types for the proposed actions:
1- Research and interchange of knowledge in order to strengthen a critical corpus of different types of knowledge regarding the subject starting from the analysis of policies and strategies. A Good Practices Handbook was written according to the guidelines proposed by IASA.
2- Interchange of experiences on technological aspects for digital sound objects preservation starting from the analysis of available technologies.
3- Transfer to the community. Reutilization of material was enabled for teaching and academic research purposes trying to boost technologic innovation and allowing said material not only to be displayed but to be transported, too.
330 minutes of recording were carried out, and 16 first settlers of the province were interviewed (http://www.koluel.org/items/browse?collection=19&page=1).
Moreover, work was carried out on defining quality control systems of the archive, checking that it contains all fields required by “OAI-PMH Harvester” (http://www.koluel.org/oai-pmh-repository/request) , and that metadata is correct.