Digitizing Audiovisual and Nonprint Materials: The Innovative Librarian’s Guide. By Scott Piepenburg. Santa Barbara, California: Libraries Unlimited, 2015. 94 p. $50.00 softcover (ISBN 978-1-4408-3780-7).
Anyone who works in a library knows that audiovisual materials can disintegrate and their playback equipment can quickly become obsolete. Does anyone remember the Betamax, or how about the laser disc? Digitization can be the solution to this problem. There are a handful of companies that will take care of this process for you, but if you are a do-it-yourselfer, then Piepenburg’s new book, Digitizing Audiovisual and Nonprint Materials, is for you.
The best part is you do not have to be a rocket scientist to understand what Piepenburg has written. Anyone with a minimum understanding of technology can learn and follow the instructions in this book. The easy-to-read, conversational style book is a no-nonsense, step-by-step instruction manual. The author takes you through the entire process, starting with what to consider before taking on a project of this nature, the space requirements needed, the hardware and software required, and then focusing on both audio files and sound recordings as well as more complex video files. The book considers some of the more common audiovisual materials libraries have collected over the last half century, including “photographs, slides, records, cassettes, videotapes, and laserdiscs” (ix).
An entire chapter is devoted to hardware requirements and subsequent chapters provide greater detail about the hardware and software needed to capture a particular format, such as slides or sound recordings. In addition to the obvious hardware needs—computers, monitors, speakers, and scanners—the book covers other items most people probably have not considered, such as disc-labeling software. The author also discusses minute details such as how to name your files and where to save them (either on the computer’s hard drive or backing them up to a larger separate storage device).
The book is divided into six chapters. The first two chapters cover such basics as things to consider before undertaking a digitization project, including some basic issues like space, lighting, and furniture. For example, if you are digitizing audiovisual materials, is there a secluded space where the noise and the music will not disturb staff and patrons? Is the electrical service adequate and does it have proper ventilation? Heat can wreak havoc on electrical equipment. Subsequent chapters are devoted to digitizing photographs and slides, capturing and editing sound recordings, and working with various video formats.
Each chapter ends with a checklist reiterating the important points. The book also has an eleven-page glossary. The book is very graphic intensive, with lots of pictures and charts explaining the various technologies and software needed for these types of projects. Piepenburg goes so far as to highlight various pieces of the hardware (inputs and outputs) in the photographs, making it easy to follow his directions. The charts, as well, make it simple to decipher the technologies.
Piepenburg gets a little technical at times, but it is nothing most librarians would not understand. In the two chapters on digitizing photographs and slides, he discusses the do’s and don’ts of various formats. For example, he advises “save the image as a .TIFF format as it is lossless, albeit more space intensive. Don’t use .JPEG as it is a ‘lossy’ format and will not serve well if the image is later enlarged electronically” (22). The book ends with a chapter called “Finishing Up,” which not only discusses storage of the digitized material, but provides helpful hints on how to store the originals, such as LP records, 8-track tapes, and CDs.
Most chapters are short, easy reads, and thirty-two sophisticated pages are devoted to audio recordings, where Piepenburg goes into particular detail about how to capture audio from records (LPs), cassette and tape decks, and other sources. He discusses the recording, editing, and exporting process for audio sources, providing details on how to use the freeware Audacity. In the chapter on capturing video, Piepenburg not only makes software suggestions, but also shares a particular video capturing and editing package that he has used.
Piepenburg is a cataloger by profession and obviously thinks like one. He suggests scanning and saving everything. Even if you do not plan to use the digitized master copies, the cataloging staff may need these items later as they create the metadata for the catalog. At one point in the book he suggests organizing images by topic first (for example churches), then geographic location. He reasons that “the thought process behind Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) is that ‘place’ is often the first subdivision in the cataloging subject heading string since that is most often how people are looking for information on a specific topic” (16). For example, a patron looking for pictures of old churches (main heading) in the United States (location being the first subdivision). In all formats he suggests saving the item “as is” and editing later for either image or sound correction. Researchers will want the master copy, while the public will most likely want the cleaned up version.
This small book is packed with information and librarians of any caliber will find it easy to follow Piepenburg’s instructions to begin a digitization project of their own. The low-barrier technical threshold should not deter anyone. The book ends with the advice to “have fun.” Librarians and archivists will enjoy reading this fast-paced book and most likely learn a thing or two in the process.—Brian F. Clark (bf-clark@wiu.edu), Western Illinois University, Macomb, Illinois