London, 16. May 2007

British Library to Partner with Cube-Tec for new "Preservation Factory"


After extensive and thorough research, the British Library Sound Archive has selected Cube-Tec's proven, industry standard technology for the critical task of ingesting, managing and preserving their highly valued collections of sound recordings.

Within the British Library's new Centre for Conservation, three QUADRIGA Import Modules will be used in a parallel ingest workflow, providing semi-automated audio digitization and digital audio transfer. CDs will be ingested and quality inspected by a separate Cube-Tec "CD-Inspector" workstation with 10 CD audio capture drives.

British Library building

In addition to QUADRIGA, the Centre will utilize Cube-Tec's ingest management solution - "CubeWorkflow" - to organize and manage the archive related tasks of multiple users in various locations throughout the facility. "CubeWorkflow" will also function as the interface between "CADENSA" - British Library's sound database catalogue - and three Cube-Tec archival modules - QUADRIGA, CD-Inspector and DOBBIN. In a parallel workflow, a DOBBIN Server will manage all post-ingest processes such as file conversion, checksum verification, and format encoding, as a fully automated background process.

The British Library will be one of the first to utilize Cube-Tec’s 'Dual-Direction Ingest Mode' to capture both sides of a half-track tape in a single pass. During ingest, QUADRIGA automatically reverses the file on the fly, so the operator can monitor both sides during the ingest process, despite the fact that one track is being read backwards.

The primary audio carriers to be transferred are:

  • Audio cassettes
  • Quarter-inch tape

Other carriers include:

  • Vinyl microgroove discs
  • Coarse-groove discs (78rpm)
  • Optical media (DVD, CD)

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