This article takes issue with that contention. Authors discussing the digitization of magnetic tape materials often conclude that practitioners lacking access to expertise and supporting infrastructure should turn the work over to vendors or seek assistance from institutions possessing them (see Section 2). The digitization of magnetic tape materials differs in several respects from the digitization of other, more common forms of library materials, such as texts and images, and requires a different set of skills and equipment. In this context researchers and practitioners increasingly realize that they must convert magnetic tape materials into a digital format before degradation occurs so that the data they contain can remain available for use ( Casey and Gordon 2007, 33 Chase 2015, 110 CLIR 2006, 2 Eisloeffel 2006a, 28 Hill 2012, 90, 94). In fact, the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia released a report in 2017 stating that magnetic media not digitized by 2025 “will in most cases be lost forever” (2). This situation presents librarians, archivists, and curators with a challenge because magnetic tapes have proven to be subject to significant deterioration over time. Magnetic tape found wide use as a medium for audio recording between the 1950s and the mid-1990s, and today many libraries, archives, and museums hold tapes containing unique performances or other audio and visual recordings in their collections ( Behl 2015, 22–23 Hill 2012, 90 IASA Technical Committee 2009, 5.4.1.1, 5.4.1.21). Realizing that many practitioners serving medium-sized and smaller institutions lacking large financial resources may not have access to a full-fledged digital repository, they suggest the use of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance’s Levels of Digital Preservation rubric as a means by which practitioners may incrementally increase the probability that digital materials made from magnetic tapes will remain accessible. The authors also emphasize the fact that while the digitization of fragile and/or degraded magnetic tape materials may contribute to the preservation of their contents, this action also creates a new set of materials with their own preservation needs. The discussion reviews the assembly of equipment and software that the team used for digitization work, discussing each element’s significance and how they came together as a functioning workflow. It provides a detailed account, including challenges faced, of how a team of practitioners without prior training or experience digitized historical audio recordings on cassette and open reel tape at Northern Illinois University Libraries. This article suggests that librarians and archivists lacking extensive technical skills or access to expertise can digitize these materials themselves. Recent work discussing the digitization and preservation of magnetic tape materials has maintained that it should be left to expert practitioners and that the resulting digital materials should be stored in digital repositories.
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