NOA GmbH has reached an important milestone in collaborating with the National Library of Finland. The German AV digitizing and archiving specialists have been helping collect, describe, preserve and make accessible Finland’s national heritage for 15 years.
The National Library boasts an extensive collection of historical resources and Finnish publications geared toward researchers, students and others interested in Finland’s cultural heritage. The Library’s digitization unit, based in Mikkeli, houses a significant audio archive, which is growing yearly. Fifteen years ago, the Library established the dedicated audio mass digitization unit to digitize large quantities of audio material as effectively as possible.
The organization has been using NOA’s NOARecord with N6000/N7000c audio hardware units, a CD Lector, the NOA JobDB workflow orchestration system, MediaButler transcoding processors and the DBScripter — a script interpreter for executing scripts in NOA systems through a basic interpreter language and an embedded integrated development environment (IDE).
The digitization process
According to Juha Korvenpää, department manager of the National Library of Finland, the collaboration with NOA has facilitated the Library’s efforts to preserve its valuable cultural heritage.
“After installing the NOA system, we started to digitize our C-cassettes,” said Korvenpää. “We built two studios for this purpose and a third for larger audio tape players and turntables. We then digitized other audio carriers, including CDs, open-reel tapes, vinyl recordings, DAT-tapes, MiniDiscs — all using our NOA system.” Korvenpää added that they are still using original NOA hardware, which has been reliable, and are slowly upgrading to the new N7000c-based system.
According to Korvenpää, a key benefit of the NOA system is that it allows all necessary information about the audio publications to be maintained and updated. “This information is automatically written into the final archive audio files during the digitization process,” he explained. “We add descriptive information, and the NOA system automatically fetches the technical metadata and information about playback devices. The system also provides information, such as who carried out the digitization, when, and the technical quality of the process because the organization wants to ensure that final audio files include correct metadata to help identify them later.”
NOA’s managing partner Jean-Christophe Kummer, said, “Considering that the National Library of Finland has an almost complete collection of all commercial audio publications in Finland, consisting of more than 160,000 audio carriers, we are very pleased to be able to assist the organization in preserving its national heritage for future generations.”
