TRAUMA: The Triangle-Area Underground Music Archive
A Digital Library Research Proposal

For Dr. Marchionini

Abe Crystal
Angelique Jenks-Brown
Butch Lazorchak
Ana Moutinho
INLS 235

May 5, 2003

Introduction
	
	TRAUMA is the Triangle Area Underground Music Archive, a digital library (DL) of popular music and musicians of the North Carolina Triangle, the geographic region in the central part of the state which includes the cities of Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Durham. TRAUMA is a prototype digital library which represents just one possible pedagogical method of representing information about the musical community that existed in the Chapel Hill/Durham/Raleigh region of North Carolina in the early-to-mid 1990's.  TRAUMA is part of a larger project in which a documentation strategy for gathering materials on this particular period in North Carolina musical history is enumerated. The documentation strategy includes the collection of physical artifacts, oral history interviews with participants, and the contextualization of the historical record. The Triangle-area musical community provides media-rich content for the digital library, while the intertwining relationships amongst the musicians and community members allows us to explore the complexities of representation in the digital environment. The currency of the multimedia objects enables us to explore the entanglements of intellectual property issues to great effect. 
	The TRAUMA digital library is designed to provide for the long-term preservation, access and rights management of the audiovisual and textual material it houses, in addition to supporting the wider goals of intellectual discovery and learning in regards to the subject matter.  The issues of preservation and access in relation to endangered cultural materials are active considerations in the digital arena, and TRAUMA hopes to facilitate research into these issues while furthering the archival goals of the documentation strategy. The completed library will be based at ibiblio.org. 

The TRAUMA prototype is accessible at: http://acrystal.dnsalias.net:8080/trauma/.
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	The North Carolina musical community of the period considered achieved national and international significance. The Triangle, where a significant concentration of activity took place, was recognized as part of a network of regional manifestations of insurgent youth culture which challenged the status quo by developing grassroots economic systems and new creative modes. The substantial contribution of North Carolina musicians and artists to this period of heightened cultural expression ensures an enduring interest in the work of the participants.  
	The enduring interest operates on a number of levels, from the casual fan to the committed scholar. For example, many of the musicians of that time period are still active, and their current work provides a continuing vibrant context for the consideration of their earlier work by scholars and fans.  Alternately, though this period of activity is situated in the relatively recent past, it has already drawn interest from cultural scholars, and will be of intense interest to historians at a future date, especially to scholars of the musical and cultural history of the state of North Carolina.
	TRAUMA attempts to speak to these several communities of use simultaneously.  For people approaching the musical material from the entertainment side, TRAUMA will provide a readily understandable overview and contextual representation of the cultural period, with easy navigation and access to materials of interest to casual users.  For the cultural historian, TRAUMA provides a digital repository of primary source materials (including digital manifestations of image, audio and video files) which give serious researchers access to primary source materials that would otherwise be unattainable or difficult to access.  Finally, for the participants in the cultural manifestation, TRAUMA provides the opportunity for them to participate in their own documentation; to have a voice in contextualizing their contribution to a cultural experience through TRAUMA's contribution facility. 

The Philosophy Behind TRAUMA

	One of the main goals of the TRAUMA project is to push on the boundary which divides the world of popular culture from the world of material appropriate for scholarly study. TRAUMA has identified significant tension between these two worlds, and the cultural material that TRAUMA collects and presents is situated precisely on the border where these two areas meet. The tension at this divide has become more apparent in the current era of electronic networked information, where a plethora of commercial and fan sites dedicated to popular music drown out attempts to approach the material with a scholarly intent. Many of the commercial and fan-constructed digital libraries and web sites dedicated to popular materials in the electronic networked environment have a notoriously poor record of reliability and authenticity, and this leads to a generally poor impression on the part of digital library patrons as to the quality of these electronic resources. This ongoing problem of questionable scholarship has endangered the reliable presentation of popular culture materials in the electronic networked environment.  TRAUMA hopes to address this issue.
	While the issues of reliability and authenticity are still being clarified in the electronic networked environment, they have been well-developed in traditional earth-bound archives and libraries. The spatially-bound repositories are (for the most part) on solid ground in terms of positing the reliability and authenticity of the materials they house, but they have a completely different set of issues which prevents them from fully achieving their goals of providing preservation and access to the materials under their care. 
	Ongoing funding and staffing concerns have forced many archival organizations to delay the documentation of more contemporary cultural manifestations until there is an absolute need. Concentrated research into the 1990s' cultural manifestations may not take place with gusto for ten, twenty or thirty years, and many archival organizations likely find it difficult to justify the allocation of resources to areas of limited current use. Unfortunately, the delay in documentation will guarantee that much important material will be irrevocably lost. Materials from ephemeral cultural manifestations are in themselves ephemeral.  Concert posters, cassette tapes, ticket stubs, personal photographs: these items begin to lose value to their creators as the distance grows between their creation and the realities of the creator's current life situation.  On the third or fourth move, the box of old records in the closet begins to seem more like a burden and less like a legacy worthy of conservation.  Important archival materials are irrevocably disposed every day as their primary use fades into the distance, and their creators move on with their lives. Creators are the least-capable of identifying the value of their own creations, certainly in terms of their archival value. If archivists wish to successfully document these cultural movements in the future, it will become increasingly important for them to take a more activist approach, and to begin documentation as early in the cycle of life as possible, before these artifacts, and the memories and narratives of their creators, are permanently lost. 
	TRAUMA offers "activist archivism" as a rallying cry for those cultural scholars who fear that contemporary cultural manifestations are underdocumented relative to their cultural value. TRAUMA perceives that traditional archival organizations favor established forms of cultural manifestation (those calcified cultural incarnations which fall comfortably within the archive's well-established collection policy) at the expense of modern, fugitive cultural manifestations.  It's easiest for libraries and archives to continue to do what they've always done; introducing change into these organizations can be traumatic.  But these caretaker's of our cultural heritage do us all a disservice when they favor the collecting of the old, established and (possibly) over-documented,  to the detriment of the contemporary, undiagnosed and ephemeral. Favoritism towards older, established cultural manifestations oftentimes has its roots in funding availability (which favors establishment culture). Of even more significance for long-term digital library development, the representation of cultural artifacts in the electronic networked environment is often determined by the availability of the material based on intellectual property considerations.
	The urgency represented above becomes more acute when considering the conservation of endangered digital media. A large proportion of the artifacts from the 1990's are born-digital, and issues surrounding the long-term preservation of these materials are some of the most pressing problems facing archivists today.  Thus, TRAUMA finds itself approaching materials which are endangered in two significant ways: the original physical artifacts are in danger of disappearing due to neglect on the part of their creators, while the digital artifacts are in danger of extinction due to system-wide myopia. Concurrently, as noted above, these two areas of concern are areas where traditional archives have adopted a wait-and-see strategy.  It's easy to see how the field of research that TRAUMA explores is fraught with urgency. In the absence of interest from traditional archival organizations, TRAUMA hopes to fill these gaps by preserving and making accessible primary source materials in the digital realm, so that scholars can begin the process of contextualizing the output of this period of cultural expression.  Concomitantly, by making the materials available, TRAUMA hopes to facilitate the process of contextualization and encourage scholars to make themselves aware of the need to document and consider the work of recent cultural manifestations. 

Overall Objectives and Methodology	 

	The TRAUMA group devised a set of objectives very early in the development process, and these objectives would guide the subsequent activities and orientation of the group.  Five broad objectives were noted at one of the first meetings:

•	Gain broad knowledge in all aspects of digital library construction.
•	Explore innovative solutions in areas within our scope of knowledge and interest.
•	Provide support for the functionalities of browsing, retrieval and contribution.
•	Document North Carolina musical culture in a timely manner and for perpetuity.
•	Provide a digital library model for other projects in other communities.

	The identification of these objectives early in the process situated the researchers subsequent efforts in a logical process and methodology with well-defined goals. The specific goal of designing a functional system was rooted in an interrelated intellectual and physical framework for a digital library so that research in the myriad issues of digital library creation, maintenance and sustainability could be explored within the broader purpose of devising a documentation strategy for the Triangle-area musical community. 
	The process of building the digital library brought the broad conceptual objectives into the real world, and allowed us to identify several specific areas in which we concentrated our research: 

•	System design and architecture, especially the use of contextual design processes to derive the system architecture;
•	Digitization Issues, including Metadata Creation;
•	Intellectual Property Issues;
•	Sustainability.

	The process of resolving issues in each of these areas during the course of constructing the library brought out a number of other important concerns that will be addressed during the course of the narrative, and we will comment extensively on our successes and failures in the last section of the paper under ASSESSMENT.
	This is a prototype version of TRAUMA. The long-term goal of the project is to build on the discoveries identified during the course of the this research, continue to push on the issues that stubbornly refuse to be resolved, and to continue work towards the goal of making TRAUMA a viable research tool. 

Portions of the material in this proposal have been adapted from papers prepared for Dr. Helen Tibbo's course, Digitization for Preservation and Access. 

System Design and Architecture

	We followed a standard user-centered design methodology, beginning with user and task analysis and continuing iteratively through design and evaluation.  We began the process with extended discussions about the types of user interactions we were hoping to support with TRAUMA. The list below is a copy of notes from an early design meeting, and gives an example of the support functions that we idealistically hoped to achieve in this early prototype.  The actual results have turned out to be different, but this list was our early exploratory guide.
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Browsing
	A. Leisurely search through all the information in the archive.
	B. Structured browsing by concept.
	C. What about external links? Open in a new window
	D. Offer up direct links (to artists that share members, labels, geography, etc.) and 	conceptual links (stylistic similarities, musical similarities)

Searching
	A. keyword searching of the content metadata (surrogate search)
	B. Query by example for audio
	C. Or, dynamic queries with say 5 audio examples (automatically recommended 	based on pre-described similarities. 
	D. Must build controlled vocabulary for this library, based on some other 	vocabulary (?) but with additional indexed terms. 

Security

Agile views
overviews
previews
shared views
history views
dynamic queries
interplay between analytical search and active browsing

diverse user communities-the people we expect to use it may not be the people who are actually using it
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User and task analysis

	We did not have access to a pool of potential users with which we could perform contextual or ethnographic inquiry, so we relied on our own analysis of potential users and tasks, as well as the domain expertise of Butch Lazorchak, who works in and is extensively familiar with the Triangle music scene.  We began by envisioning a number of scenarios for the digital library’s use.  We then summarized the scenarios and grouped them into a few key tasks. Examples of the scenarios for each task area shown below. 

Task One: Find music 

•	 “Rick wonders if any of the bands from his college days have music online… he wants to find some samples of their music to download and listen to.”
•	“Beavis went to school at State in 1992 and there was a band the used to practice in the house down the street.  He's not sure which band is was, so he wanted to limit his search to bands that existed in 1992.”
•	“Kathleen is a music student from Massachusetts.  She is comparing rock bands from her state and North Carolina.  She will need to hear some music…”
•	“Paul is a graphic arts student and needs to write a paper about rock record covers in the nineties… he needs also to compare the covers with the music.  He would need to have some music excerpts.”

Task Two: Find contextual information

•	“Lucinda has discovered TRAUMA and is very interested in the material. However, she wants a little more information than just a listing of people's bands and the instruments they played. She wants some contextual analysis on the musical material and the scene.”
•	“Snidely Whiplash is an intellectual property lawyer.  He discovers intellectual property on the TRAUMA site that he believes is being used without permission… How can he find out what permissions were granted for that material at the time it was submitted?”
•	“Rajiv is using the TRAUMA site, but he has some questions about the material on the site.  Not simply where something is, or if it even exists at all, but some deeper questions about the material.”
•	“Harvey knows the lyrics to a song, but he doesn't know who does the song, and he wishes he could find out.”
•	“Julie clicks on spatula and now has an alphabetical listing of things, all having to do with spatula… She clicks on a poster and gets a page with a description of the item, any history with it, and thumbnail views of the poster available in varying dpi.”
•	“Jamie is a cool artsy fellow and enjoys finding unusual artwork for his computer desktop.  He explores our DL for interesting album covers… a message pops up letting him know that the image he is copying is watermarked and if he would like an image without a watermark he should refer to the copyright permission section. At which point he leaves our DL.”

Task Three: Find people

•	“Jobete is a guitar player and is interested in who all the guitar players are in the North Carolina bands. “
•	“Carlos wants to know how to get in touch with the musicians that were in some of his favorite bands.”
•	“Hugh is a newspaper journalist, and is assigned to write a 1-page article about Spatula… he would like also to contact some guys from the band to know what they are doing now.”

Task Four: See relationships

•	“He likes the music of the Archers of Loaf, and he wonders if there are other bands from the area that have a similar musical sound.”
•	”He wishes that there were a quick graphical way to show the connections between different recording artists. The interrelationships between artists are often complex, and he hates having to jump back and forth between different web pages to try and make the connections.”
•	“James… is a professor at UNC and he is going to make a lecture about Triangle music in the nineties… He should be able to know some famous player’s transitions from one band to another, just in case a student asks him.”

Task Five: Contribute to the community

•	“Hark the hacker loves music, and he loves fooling with open-source software… He wants to download the DL software, go mess with the source code, and possibly contribute his ideas back to the architects of the TRAUMA site.”
•	“Loompanics has been collecting the music of bands from North Carolina for years, and notices some discrepancies in the intellectual content on the site.  He'd like to make a correction to the information…”
•	“Hope has a lot of specialized knowledge about North Carolina music that she would like to contribute to TRAUMA.  However, she doesn't have access to a computer but would still like to contribute.”
•	“Rajiv is using the TRAUMA site, but he has some questions about the material on the site… What level of support can he expect from the site, and what type of pointers to greater information does the site provide (links to outside resources, listservs, FAQ, etc.)?”
•	“Ernie is a long-time music fan with extensive knowledge of the Chapel Hill scene.  He loves the content available on TRAUMA, and would like to help organize and annotate it.”

Task Six: “Attack” the community

•	“Josh had a friend in a band in the 90s and is a psycho stalker.”
•	“Bomber the anarchist hates the government, but because he loves computing and is the hacker-type of anarchist, he hates Microsoft even more… Will Bomber have problems with the TRAUMA site?”
•	“Snidely Whiplash is an intellectual property lawyer.  He discovers intellectual property on the TRAUMA site that he believes is being used without permission.”

Information architecture 

	These scenarios and their accompanying tasks provided a context for enabling access to the digital library’s content.  We focused on three aspects of this problem: structure, navigation and labeling.  We tried to think about how users will navigate through the DL, and asked questions such as:  Will they feel comfortable at each step?  Will they understand the context they are currently in and the information available to them?  Does the DL flexibly support information seeking by different types of users with different abilities and interests? To support these goals, we envisioned a layered architecture that supports both simple access to popular materials (for casual browsers) and precise searching and browsing (for scholars and other expert users).  
	Fundamentally, the DL consists of artifacts (documents, sound files, video clips, etc.) which are associated with entities (people, bands, albums, etc.) and formats (audio, video, image, text).  Artifacts are always seen in the context of the entities they are associated with.  Likewise, viewing an entity provides access to its associated artifacts, which may be in multiple formats.  
	Translating this conceptual model into actual interface designs was not always straightforward, but we attempted to make the mapping as natural as possible for users.

Interface Design and Prototyping

	We went through several iterations of prototypes, beginning with low-fidelity paper prototypes and progressing to medium-fidelity PowerPoint and HTML prototypes. (See Appendix 1 for an example of the handwritten paper prototypes. See appendices [2-8] for examples of the PowerPoint slides which represent the combined paper prototypes.) We conducted informal formative evaluations at each step.  Lacking the time and resources to perform empirical usability testing, we relied on analytic methods, such as cognitive walkthroughs and heuristic evaluation.  We view our final prototype as having acceptable usability, but with many opportunities for improvement, particularly in supporting navigation and discovery as the DL scales.

Future Work

	We see many possibilities for future work on the TRAUMA user interface, work which would be applicable to a wide range of DLs.  Implementing social navigation techniques, such as recommendations derived from log analysis, could help new users move through the domain, and give scholars valuable data on community structure.  Providing richer previews (such as brief audio or video clips available on mouseover) and overviews could help users choose from large sets of artifacts.  In addition, formal usability testing of such techniques (as well as TRAUMA’s “first-generation” features) could provide useful insights, particularly given TRAUMA’s distinctive cultural goals and user base.

Digitization Issues

[The material in this section was adapted from a pair of papers prepared for Dr. Helen Tibbo's course Digitization for Preservation and Access in Spring 2003.]
 
Selection of Materials:

	The ultimate goal of the TRAUMA project is to represent information from a substantial majority of musicians, performers and contributors active during the time period specified. In this prototype project, the selection of material is much more constrained, and was based on items already available in the TRAUMA archives.  Three musical artists (the bands Spatula and Shark Quest, as well as the solo performer Chuck Johnson) were chosen for the testbed display. These band members still live in the area and are still active performers. This creates opportunities to receive feedback from the artist community on a number of issues, including the core purposes of TRAUMA. Additionally, ready personal accessibility provides opportunities to begin the process of securing intellectual property licenses and releases the from artists, and to work with the artists on intellectual property issues. A substantial amount of multimedia material is already on hand related to each of  these artists, and these three artists are an exemplar of the complex interrelations that exist amongst the musicians in the North Carolina music scene of the period, and thus provide the opportunity to explore these complex interrelations through the system design and architecture.
	These artists have released numerous recordings during their careers, including more than a half dozen compact discs and at least a half dozen 7" vinyl singles.  The artists collectively have been quite active in the local musical community, and have numerous recordings from solo projects and other combinations that will be available to digitize down the road. We have chosen a representative sampling of these artists' commercially available recordings for digitization for this project, as well as concert posters, publicity photos and related ephemera. The techniques of the digitization process are exemplified by the work done to prepare Spatula's compact disc Despina By Land for display in the digital library. 
	Compact discs are complex digital objects, and one goal of the project is to make the material available in such a way that the complex nature of the item is retained.  This involves creating metadata which links each aspect of the object (its digital audio file and the image files which represent the physical appearance of the compact disc cover), while also representing the object in the design space in such a way that its complexity is made manifest. 
	Additionally, due to the archival orientation of the TRAUMA project, preservation-quality master files of each digital file have been created.  These files are the source masters from which the web derivatives have been created.  These archival masters are not readily available to casual users of the site, but are stored so they can be retrieved by legitimate researchers when necessary.  
	For the particular digital object mentioned above (Despina By Land), the complexity is represented in the following manner. Each face of the CD digipak has been scanned, with two versions available; a smaller thumbnail, and a larger version which provides much greater detail.  Digipaks are all-encompassing compact disc containers, similar in design to books. These containers are much more complex than the standard CD "jewel box," which generally features a plastic case with thin sheets of paper inserted in the plastic. Digipaks are more difficult to represent as individual images because the covers often fold over on themselves, and the tray which holds the CD is an integral design element, which is not true when the CD artwork is housed in a jewel box. A TIFF format master version of each image was created, and web-accessible derivatives were created from the master. An accompanying image data dictionary iterates the image metadata elements for both the TIFF masters and the JPEG derivatives.
	The audio files on the CD have also been digitized. Two different version of each audio file are available. One version is in the WAV file format, a raw audio format native to the Windows operating system (but accessible to any operating system). These files are large, and are not conducive to local access in the electronic networked environment. However, they represent compact disc-quality sound, and are this file format has become one of the archival standards for preservation masters. As with the TIFF files for images, these WAV files are archival masters only, and will not be made readily accessible in the networked environment, but will be available to researchers. Other archival masters of analog-source materials have been recorded in the AIFF format, a format native to the Macintosh operating system.  Web-accessible derivatives are derived from both the WAV and the AIFF files in the form of files in the MP3 format.  These files are compressed for access in the networked environment, and represent a "lossy" file type, one inappropriate for archival purposes. 		
	Over 50 audio files were digitized from a variety of source materials, including vinyl records. A similar number of images were digitized as well. The total amount of information digitized in the prototype version of TRAUMA is 4,369,672 kilobytes.

Challenges of Digitization:

	The many challenges of the digitization process are enumerated below. We detail the physical processes of scanning images and "ripping" audio files, and identify the software and hardware utilized for each purpose. These processes were challenging in their own right, but we also include the identification and creation of metadata dictionaries for the image and audio files in this section. 
	Attempts to digitize video created challenges from the start.  The lack of ready accessibility to software and the tremendous file sizes of digitized video led us to abort exploration of video artifacts for the present time.  Digitized video will certainly be represented in future versions of TRAUMA, but it is absent for the time being. 

Image material:

	The image materials chosen for digitization provided a number of different challenges.  We can detail a pair of artifacts and enunciate the challenges corresponding to each of them.  These artifacts are representative of the variety of issues at play in the process of digitization.  The actual digitizing of artifacts is considered one of the simplest aspects of digital library creation, but it is full of its own complexity.
	The first item considered was a publicity photo of the band Spatula. This item was relatively straightforward, but it also represents the many issues involved in digitizing image material. Like the other image materials, this item was scanned at 600dpi and saved as a TIFF file for archival purposes.  JPEG derivatives were then created from the TIFF master.  Two different JPEG derivatives were created for this item at 72dpi each (the standard dots per inch for web graphics); a web master copy, which was approximately 750 X 750 pixels, and a smaller thumbnail item, approximately 150 X 150 pixels. Each of these web derivative items were resized after their derivation from the TIFF file.  The original TIFF master is left unchanged. 
	The original TIFF master of the photo included contextual information printed in the white space surrounding the photo (including the address of the label and the name of the photographer).  These items were cropped from the photo in order to use it as an introductory artist graphic for the web. Quite a bit of cropping and rotating had to take place in order to get an original copy free from scanner bed background images and properly oriented. While the cropped publicity photo is useful as generic graphic, a version of the publicity photo with the contextual material included is an equally important part of the Spatula exhibit. 
	The second batch of materials chosen were the images on each face of the CD digipak for the Spatula album Despina By Land.  600dpi TIFF masters were made of each individual image. As mentioned earlier in this report, the digipak's graphic design and layout makes it more difficult to represent than compact disc booklets housed in jewel boxes. In this instance, the digipak folds out into six panels (with only four of the panels actually featuring artwork), and the decision was made to scan each of the panels individually and present them each separately.  This judgment is open to further review.  While it does allow for the possibility of more closely examining each individual panel, it doesn't provide the pull-away view of the item that would provide perspective on the item itself.  
	As with the publicity photo, two web derivatives were created from each TIFF master.  The challenges for digitizing these items were numerous.  Several scanning iterations were necessary to determine the proper size of both the web masters and the web thumbnails.  Several sizes were attempted, and a dummy web page was created to view each of the sizes in an imagined web environment. The web master images are impressively sized for the user to examine the detail of the artwork, but they are slightly too big, aesthetically, for the web environment.  Each of the images opens in a new window, which is desired, but the images are slightly too big for orderly representation within the context of the rest of the site.  Conversely, the thumbnail images have been deemed too large for their purpose as small, representative images, and will likely have to be resized at some point in the future.  One of the challenges of digitization is how to present thumbnail images in a standard size in the web environment while dealing with artifactual materials which come in a number of different sizes. The strategy of relevance-enhanced image reduction suggested by Neilson came late to the game, but will be utilized in future site revisions. 
	Once the sizes were determined, great care had to be taken to ensure that the settings on the scanner remained the same throughout the scanning event.  The process of scanning the TIFF original, then creating each of the web derivatives was a painstaking process.   
	Naming schemes were also problematic.  In order to fully describe each different version of the different image files, a convoluted naming scheme was instituted.  More research needs to be done in this area to determine what the best practices are for naming files in large digital libraries.  The utilization of a Handle System-type universal resource naming schema would likely solve this problem for the long term, but time constraints prevented us from exploring this as a solution for the short term.
	It soon became apparent that storage issues come rapidly to the fore when dealing with archival-quality image, audio and video masters. While ibiblio effectively features unlimited server storage space, the reality of the situation is that they are not prepared at the present time to handle the quantity of material that would be contained in an archival digital library such as TRAUMA.  For experiential purposes we loaded several archival audio and image files on to the ibiblio web servers, but for practical reasons the majority of the archival files will be stored on optical discs for the foreseeable future. It almost goes without saying that the supposedly simple process of loading large files onto web servers can be a very time-consuming process in its own right. 

Audio Material:

	The audio material had its own particular issues.  The digitization of analog-source audio materials took place at the specialized media lab in the basement of the Undergraduate Library. The TRAUMA researchers were relatively unfamiliar with the multitude of software options available for digitizing audio, and relied, to a great extent, on the assistance of the technicians at the lab.  The main purpose for digitizing at the media lab was to convert analog vinyl records to digital audio, but while lab technicians assured the TRAUMA researchers that they were capable of handling that type of work, in actuality it was a less-than-ideal setting. 
	The following hardware and software were utilized in the digital encoding of the vinyl records: 

Mac G4 computer
Sony PS-LX250H turntable
Panasonic Digital Video Cassette Recorder AG-DV1000 
JVC R-K100 amplifier
Sony STR-D311 amplifier
Peak DV 3.0 software 

	The Panasonic recorder was specifically designed to play and record digital video tape, but the UL lab technicians were attempting to use it as an amplifier for the turntable. Unfortunately, it wasn't powerful enough (the turntable signal was too low and noisy), so we had to get another amplifier, a JVC R-K100. That one still didn't work, so we finally got the Sony STR-D311, which was an amplifier with the appropriate pre-amp for plugging in a turntable. This amplifier was the only one which allowed us to effectuate a significant input signal level, but the even here, the audio signal featured significant distortion and noise that would be unacceptable if these items were to be recorded as archival masters in an ideal situation.  For long-term TRAUMA digitization needs a better solution must be found for digitizing analog-source materials.  
	The hardware and software in the media lab are all based on the Macintosh operating system, thus the archival masters of the material we recorded there are in the AIFF format, a raw audio format native to the Macintosh (but accessible by other operating systems).  This format is a perfectly acceptable raw audio format, roughly equivalent to the WAV audio format. However, our original desire had been to record all of our audio files in a standard format, and the limitations of the UL lab recording setup prevented us from standardizing the audio types in the digital library without migrating the AIFF files to the WAV format. Migration of the AIFF files to the WAV format is still a possibility for the long-term. 
	 The audio files were encoded at 44,100 kilohertz, 16 bit stereo. The PEAK software will actually encode as high as 48,000 kilohertz, but due to the high percentage of CD audio in the materials considered for TRAUMA, the researchers decided that it made more sense to have everything at the same resolution, rather than have the analog-source materials at 48,000 and the CD audio at 44,100. However, the 44,100khtz/16 bit encoding is a compromise resolution for the current purposes only.  Research in long-term audio preservation suggests that archival masters could be digitized at 96,000/24 bit, and even as high as 192,000/24 bit. The thinking behind these recommendations is that the high resolution of those two encoding levels could overcome the loss of data from the analog-to-digital transfer, and provide greater flexibility for unknown and unrealized long-term uses.    Unfortunately, the software at the media lab was incapable of encoding at those rates. In addition, the large file sizes that would accompany those files are probably unacceptable based on the storage issues at ibiblio mentioned previously. However, the higher-resolution encoding levels suggested above are the preferred levels for long-term digital preservation of audio, and will be explored by TRAUMA in the future. An alternate method of digitization and storage of the audio files will have to be explored.   
	Due to time constraints we neglected to create web derivatives of the AIFF files at the time of the original digitization.  The MP3 derivatives were later created using a Macintosh iMac computer and the iTunes 2.0.4 software.
	For the audio files that we extracted from the compact disc, we used the following hardware and software:

Hardware: HP Pavilion zt1250 laptop computer
Software: HP Musicmatch Jukebox software 7.10

	WAV format files (a Windows-native PCM file format, which is accessible to other operating systems) were created first (44,100 kilohertz stereo 16 bit depth), then derivative MP3 files were made from those original WAV files. The Musicmatch software was capable of making bulk conversions from the WAV files to the MP3 files, but the process didn't allow enough opportunities to examine the conversion options, or even to look closely at the files.  Musicmatch is a commercial application that comes with HP computers, and it isn't designed for sophisticated audio engineering. In the future, other types of software will have to be considered that allow a more sophisticated range of encoding options. 
	The researchers' difficulties with relatively simple digital encoding exemplifies some of the positives and negatives of the current explosion of interest in digital music.  Quick and simple encoding devices are in the hands of almost anyone with a computer, but the standard software often provides minimal guidance in how to make reasonably archival digital audio files.  With the current setup we were able to economically encode our digital audio without having to resort to the use of an expensive recording studio, but it is certain that more sophisticated software and hardware will be necessary for future additions to TRAUMA in order to apply the levels of sophistication that the materials require. 
	An additional area of concern for TRAUMA is the issue of the proprietary nature of the various file formats.  A German company owns the rights to the MP3 compression schema and tightly controls its application through licensing. WAV is a Windows-native format, while AIFF is a Macintosh-native format. While these two formats can operate across operating systems, there are differences in how the files behave. We have explored encoding audio files in an open-source (Linux-native) format known as Ogg Vorbis, but there are more complex issues related to acquiring and learning to use the digitization software, and this solution to proprietary software concerns must still be explored. Against our wishes we find ourselves with multiple format types in the digital library due to our reliance on propriety software and hardware and the immediately (and economically) available recording options. Prior to full-scale implementation of TRAUMA, reliable recording hardware and software must be obtained to provide the encoding options and standardization we require.  

Metadata Creation:

	After the petty frustrations of audio and image file manipulation, the metadata creation was a relative breeze.  The metadata for the images is based on the Metadata for Administration and Preservation of Digital Images (MAPDI) schema designed by Dr. Helen R. Tibbo and graduate student Claire Eager (with assistance from the Preservation Metadata Working Group) at the School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for the State Library of North Carolina, Department of Cultural Resources NC Exploring Cultural Heritage Online (ECHO) Program. This metadata schema, as its title would suggest, is designed to assist in the administration and preservation of digital images.  We have added additional metadata fields to the MAPDI schema to cover our descriptive needs, and we have also deprecated a number of MAPDI elements which we felt were unnecessary for our purposes. 
	The final image metadata schema includes the following elements:

itemID
itemTitle
sourceID
sourceType
sourceCreationDate
digitalCreator
captureHardware
captureSoftware
captureSettings
imageSoftware
sourceHeight
sourceWidth
creationDate
resolution
compression
fileFormat
objectHeight
objectWidth
bitDepth
fileName
digitalMaster
revisionHistory
repositoryCopyright
rights
fileSize
subject
relation
description
 
	The audio metadata schema is a TRAUMA-derived schema, SUMS AUDIO, which is based on the Dublin Core metadata schema. Coming to terms with various metadata schemas for audio can be a daunting task.  The number and variety of schemas is infinitely varied, ranging from the overwhelmingly complex schema of MPEG-7 (Moving Pictures Expert Group), a metadata standard for describing multimedia content data that is suited for rigorous applications, to schema created on the fly by casual audio producers which might include artist, title and little else. 
	Audio has been identified as one of the "killer apps" of the internet; the popularity of networked audio is now beyond question, and commercial opportunities abound.  However, one difficulty that has prevented commercial producers, amateur users and university researchers from coming together is the lack of a unified descriptive language for digital information that can be communicated across the networked environment. Additionally, this unified language needs to be simple enough for the home user to apply to files created on their own computers, but sophisticated enough for librarians, archivists and other information professionals to utilize for their important preservation, discovery, and rights management purposes. 
	Each domain of knowledge which calls audio its own has created a metadata schema to portray audio in its own image.  What has heretofore been missing is a simple schema which provides the appropriate level of complexity required to accurately describe the material, but which is also user-friendly in a way that provides for wide adaptation. 
	The many differing audio metadata schemas are designed for different purposes: support for preservation, discovery, music information retrieval, and digital authenticity are just a few of many possible support purposes. Are musical pieces organized and searchable by date, style, composer, melodic theme, performance, performers, length, genre, storage medium, or all of these? Before determining an appropriate audio metadata schema, the support purposes must first be defined. 
	The SUMS AUDIO metadata schema is designed to support many purposes, but is most appropriately applied to experimental work in digital libraries. It is in digital libraries such as TRAUMA that the issues of preservation, discovery and rights management find their sternest tests. Metadata designed to support preservation, discovery, and rights management is the range of metadata ideally suited to support the core descriptive, structural and administrative needs of common creators and user of digital audio. Thus, the relatively simple metadata schema proffered here could also have wide applicability in the consumer realm.   
	
SUMS Audio Purposes Defined

	In order to determine the metadata elements necessary to support the core purposes introduced above, the concepts of preservation, discovery and rights management in our instance must first be defined. For preservation, it is helpful to examine the work of the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model:

	Preservation metadata is the information infrastructure that supports the processes 	associated with digital preservation. More specifically, it is the information 	necessary to maintain the viability, renderability, and understandability of digital 	resources over the long-term. Viability requires that the archived digital object’s 	bit stream is intact and readable from the digital media upon which it is stored. 	Renderability refers to the translation of the bit stream into a form that can be 	viewed by human users, or processed by computers. Understandability involves 	providing enough information such that the rendered content can be interpreted 	and understood by its intended users. Preservation metadata can serve as input to 	preservation processes, and also record the output of these same processes.

For discovery, we can look to the work of Paul Conway for clarification:

	In the digital world, preservation is the action and access is the thing – the act of 	preserving access...Preserve access to what? The answer suggested in this chapter 	is: a high quality, high value, well-protected, and fully integrated digital product 	that is derived from but independent of original source documents. The content, 	structure, and integrity of the digital product assume center stage – and the ability 	of a machine to transport and display this product becomes an assumed end result 	of the preservation action rather than its primary goal.

For rights management, the issues are more complicated. On one side are the creators and originators of digital objects who have a strong economic interest in protecting their investment.  On the other side is the general public (including libraries and archives) with a strong interest in full access to digitized materials.   Duke law professor James Boyle writes often on the subject of intellectual property in cyberspace:

	Who is affected by the politics of intellectual property? Many groups are, though 	they might not see it that way. Some of the most innovative software engineers 	have objected to the extension of patent law to cover their products; they fear it 	will help create an oligopolistic software market and diminish 	inventiveness...Environmentalists wish that some of the profits on patented 	pharmaceuticals drawn from the rain forest could be returned to protect their 	source. Religious organizations protest the patenting of living organisms.  
	Each group is complaining about an intellectual property system that has 	expanded out of control. Yet they don't see those complaints, or their interests, as 	linked. Part of the problem is that we have not adapted our public debate to the 	realities of the information age. Censorship we understand. But the subtler forms 	of control imposed by ownership of information? These are harder to discuss.  

	While the broad purposes of preservation, discovery and rights management are the overriding goals of the SUMS schema, it is important to note that any complete schema will also have to address each of the three main categories of metadata: descriptive, administrative and structural metadata.  The SUMS schema includes metadata which applies to each of these subject areas. 

Survey of the Audio Metadata Literature

	There are several high-level metadata schemas that must be considered at the outset.  One high-level schema, the emerging Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) developed by the Digital Library Federation and supported by the Library of Congress AV Project, provides high-level metadata information. The METS schema proposes to define metadata elements for complex digital objects, including multiple instantiations of individual items.  Its focus on aggregate objects puts it outside our current scope of  inquiry, though its identification of the complex construction of digital items and their web of interrelationships (the idea that a record album in the digital world is a multi-part object which includes the audio file along with the digitized album cover image) is an important model worthy of further investigation. The SUMS purpose is to provide the metadata elements necessary to fully encapsulate a single digital item, while recognizing that there is greater complexity in the world. The METS schema successfully addresses this complexity, and is likely to be considered more fully as the TRAUMA concept becomes more fully developed.
	The METS standard can incorporate any other metadata schema desired, and one of the most widely disseminated general purpose descriptive metadata schemas is the Dublin Core (DC) metadata schema.  The DC is a standard for cross-domain information resource description, with an information resource defined to be anything that has identity. By definition it is designed to be broadly applicable, and this breadth is both a blessing and a curse. DC is useful for identifying core elements common to all complete metadata schemas, but its failing is its inability to fully account for the core elements of individual domains of knowledge.
	In the realm of intellectual property rights, the <indecs> Metadata Framework, a project of Muze, Inc., the International DOI Federation and others, is working on metadata solutions to intellectual property rights issues. 
	In more audio-centric realms, the Library of Congress has devised an audio-visual metadata schema for the digital material housed in their new Culpepper, Virginia audio-visual repository. Even more detailed is the richly descriptive schema of MPEG-7, though its complexity makes it too unwieldy to stand on its own for our purposes. Other organizations have identified their own metadata schemas, or have suggested elements appropriate for consideration. Metadata schemas considered during this survey of the literature include those from the Michigan State University Digital and Multimedia Center; the Library of Congress' Digital Audio-Visual Preservation Prototyping Project; the Colorado Digitization Project; the Indiana University Digital Music Library Project; the Audio Engineering Society's Radio Traffic Audio Delivery Extension to the Broadcast-Wave-File Format; and the RLG Preservation Metadata Element set, in addition to those mentioned above.

SUMS Audio Elements Defined

	Specific metadata elements were gathered from the sources enumerated above, and then were evaluated. It soon became clear that the Dublin Core metadata schema could be used as the basic container architecture for SUMS.  For the most part, it has been possible to fit the SUMS requirements into the Dublin Core (utilizing DC refinements in places), though further research in the SUMS schema may omit or alter this reliance on Dublin Core (or alternately, align with it more closely). All of the chosen elements reflect the Dublin Core namespace with the exception of the element ORIGINATOR.  This element is similar to the Dublin Core element of  PUBLISHER. However, the European Broadcast Union element of ORIGINATOR was chosen because PUBLISHER is a somewhat conflicted term, especially in the realm of intellectual property rights.
	We introduce each element, define its purpose (utilizing the European Broadcasting Union's EBU Core Metadata Set for Radio Archives), note any refinements and suggest important information that should be included under each element. The elements are listed in lower case as prescribed by the XML standards. 
	In addition, while defining each individual field, we also place it within the broad conceptual metadata areas of description, administration and technical.  

The format is: <name of element>(Established metadata schema which provides the source of the element name).  [Determination as to whether the element can be repeated or not.] [Element required or optional?]

1. <title> (DC). A name given to the resource. [Single item] [Required]

2. <creator> (DC). An entity primarily responsible for making the content of the resource. This would be analogous to "artist," and includes one DC sub-element
	<creator.role> This would include a further refinement of the creator into terms such as artist, singer,  [Repeatable] [Required]

3. <subject> (DC). The topic of the content of the resource.  Typically, the subject will be expressed as keywords. Recommended best practice is to select a value from a controlled vocabulary or formal classification scheme. Due to the specialized requirements of audio description at the commercial level, one non-DC sub-element has been included:
	<subject.genre> (rock, jazz, classical, etc.) [Repeatable] [Optional]

4. <originator> (EBU). The ORIGINATOR is the entity that has made the resource available in digital form. ORIGINATOR encapsulates the OAIS concept of responsible agency, and could include anyone from a single individual to a large corporation. [Single item] [Optional]

5. <contributor> (DC). An entity responsible for making contributions to the content of the resource. This would include any other named persons who added value to the work, including the producer, fellow musicians, etc. Includes one DC sub-element
	<contributor.role> [Repeatable] [Optional]

6. <date> (DC)-A date associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource. Typically, DATE will be associated with the creation or availability of the resource. This element includes two non-DC sub-elements [DC has the qualifiers ISSUE and CREATED in the DC-LIB application profile, but they don't seem to accurately represent what we're shooting for here.]
	<date.creation_date>-the original date an audio work was created [single item]
	<date.digitization_date>-the date that the item was digitized by its "originator" [Repeatable] [Required]

7. <format> (DC). The physical or digital manifestation of the resource, which would include MIME types. Many of the most important aspects of FORMAT come under the one DC sub-element 
	<format.extent> FORMAT.EXTENT represents the size or duration of the resource. It is highly recommended that FORMAT.EXTENT include values for these specific format options: file size, duration (in a time format), sampling_frequency (in kilohertz), bit rate (in bits per sample), channel_track_quantity (number of different audio channels), data_rate (in kilobits), and sound_field (indicates the aural space arrangement of the sound, i.e., mono, stereo, etc.), encryption [Repeatable] [Required]

8. <identifier> (DC). An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context. Recommended best practice is to identify the resource by means of a string or number conforming to a formal identification system. We are mainly thinking of a Handle System URN here, but other unique identifiers could be included, including original company's label number. It is highly recommended that the IDENTIFIER element include a value for the checksum (or another error-correction value), as well as the checksum type and date. [Repeatable] [Required]

9. <language> (DC). A language of the intellectual content of the resource.  [Repeatable] [Optional]

10. <coverage> (DC). The extent or scope of the content of the resource, including spatial location (a place name or geographic coordinates), temporal period (a period label, date, or date range) or jurisdiction.  With two DC sub-elements
	<coverage.spatial> For geographic description.
	<coverage.temporal> For time period description [Repeatable] [Optional]

11. <rights> (DC). Information about rights held in and over the resource, including detailed copyright declarations. It is highly recommended that the RIGHTS element includes values for these specific options, including the appropriate date information:  Permissions (a relation which is allowed by an agreement, for example, a Creative Commons license which states explicitly how the digital item can be used); copyright_holder_composition; copyright_holder_sound_recording. [Repeatable] [Optional]

The following DC fields are not included in SUMS:
Description [covered fully by SUBJECT]
Publisher [this is being replaced by ORIGINATOR due to the imprecise usage of the term PUBLISHER in the world of intellectual property]
Type [covered fully by SUBJECT and FORMAT]
Source [the source identifier information will be included as part of the Identifier element]
Relation [we are considering individual items at this time and not fully considering them as part of more complex digital objects] 

	The SUMS schema is a broad conceptual schema which is still in the developmental stages. The TRAUMA digital library is the first practical application of the SUMS schema, and the attempt to implement the schema led to some immediate adaptation issues.  There are significant needs differences between a database application and the purposes for which the Dublin Core metadata schema is applied. This caused us to adapt the SUMS schema in significant ways.  The actual database field elements for the audio metadata are as follows:

audioID
title
creator
genre
labelID
creationDate
SourceCreation
formatID
SourceID
language
rights
description

	Data dictionaries for both the MAPDI image elements and the SUMS Audio elements appear in the appendix [appendices 9 and 10, respectively]. The complexity of research into metadata standards is formidable. Despite having spent a significant amount of time over the past six months studying the Dublin Core schema, it is apparent that the researchers still have a long way to go before achieving a full and complete understanding of how the Dublin Core works, and how it can be applied to individual digital objects and complex agglomerations of digital objects.  Further research is needed in this area. 

Intellectual Property Concerns

	At the outset of  TRAUMA, we chased intellectual property and copyright concerns away with the wave of a hand.  At the present time, they've become one of TRAUMA's  central concerns. Once we realized how important and complex the problems that digital libraries are facing with copyright issues, we began to do extensive research on the subject. 
	One early effort to gain insight into the intellectual property issues was to convene a focus group featuring six local musicians 	and to ask them what their concerns were about intellectual property in the electronic networked environment.  We also queried them about possible solutions to some of the issues, including the use of various kinds of licensing to allow the digital library to present the materials. 
	Additionally, started by clarifying that our material actually was subject to the copyright laws. All of the material featured in TRAUMA was published after 1923, making it subject to current copyright law. A lecture by Glenn Otis Brown in early 2003 on the Creative Commons and the copyright laws offered us a possible solution to the copyright issue. 
	We did extensive research on copyright laws and how they related to the material we were considering for TRAUMA. According to Circular 22 on “How to Investigate the Copyright Status of a Work,” sometimes it is not enough just to follow these three ways:

•	look for elements such as “copyright notice, place and date of publication, author and publisher”; and if “the work is a sound recording, examine the disk, tape cartridge, or cassette in which the recorded sound is fixed, or the album cover, sleeve, or container in which the recording is sold”;
•	search in the catalogs of the Copyright Office or others
•	ask the Copyright Office to make the search for us.

	One must also be aware with the changes that take place once in a while, like the Copyright Act of 1976, the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988, the Copyright Renewal Act of 1992, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.
	Circular 1, on Copyright Basics, tells us that in order to people be able to perceive that a document has copyright, there are three visually elements that mark a work as falling under copyright.  One such mark is the symbol © (the letter C in a circle), or the word "Copyright," or the abbreviation "Copr.," in conjunction with the year of first publication of the work. In the case of compilations or derivative works incorporating previously published material, the year date of first publication of the compilation or derivative work is sufficient. The year date may be omitted where a pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work, with accompanying textual matter, if any, is reproduced in or on greeting cards, postcards, stationery, jewelry, dolls, toys, or any useful article. Additionally, the name of the owner of copyright in the work, or an abbreviation by which the name can be recognized, or a generally known alternative designation of the owner should also be included. 
	On the other hand, if we are dealing with audio recordings, more precisely, “phonorecords”, you cannot use the ©, because they are not considered “copies.”  In this case, we change the first element for a  (the letter P in a circle), and add the other two mentioned before: “the year of first publication of the sound recording,” and “the name of the owner of copyright in the sound recording”. In this case, the example could be:  2003 Squealer Music Inc.
	Of course there are other cases that can be studied like the unpublished works or collections whose authors claim copyright, but for now they are not related to our TRAUMA Digital Library.
	After reading the laws and related information about copyright in the digital era, we realized that Creative Commons licenses would be a possible solution for us and for those who submit documents to our DL. 
	The TRAUMA team studied the Creative Commons license options by answering the questions they have on their site. Creative Commons is a project to allow creators of works to "license" their material for others to use.  One of the significant side effects of the extension to the copyright laws has been that material no longer enters the public domain because the copyright extends far into the future.  Copyright coverage now extends to all creations at the moment of creation, whether the author has gone through the formalities of copyright registration or not.  This means that there are a number of items floating around in the public space that are under copyright, whether their creators are concerned with that or not.  However, people such as digital librarians have to be concerned with this material, because they must clear all the copyrights of the materials they wish to use in their digital libraries. Concurrently, there is no way for creators to place their material in the public domain.  Essentially, the size of our public domain is shrinking.  Creative Commons licenses allow creators to make it clear that some uses of their otherwise copyrighted materials are allowable, precisely so that persons considering re-use for a variety of purposes can be clear what the intentions of the creators are.  This is where Creative Commons comes in. They have made available several license variations that creators can use to announce their willingness to share their material for certain purposes, including the sharing of the material in something like a digital library and allowing access to the material for scholarly and entertainment purposes.
	One of several licenses allows everybody “to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work”, and, in “return, licensees must give the original author credit.” On the other hand,  the non-commercial license “permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work. In return, licensees may not use the work for commercial purposes."	
	Contributors can choose one of these licenses, or combine them further with others like the "no derivative works" license, which allows others to "copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies” of their work and “not derivative works based upon it;” or "share alike", which means to “allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs [their] work." On the other hand, the contributor can choose to release all control on the document to everybody, with no conditions, by dedicating the works to the public domain. In this case, Creative Commons has a logo for “no rights reserved” with “PD”.
	Licensing is one significant way that digital libraries can make copyrighted material available for use.  The Creative Commons licenses are the method by which TRAUMA will make the copyrighted material available in the digital library. Licensing is only a partial solution to the problem of representing copyrighted material in the electronic network environment.  The labor involved in licensing large amounts of material from individual creators can be overwhelming.  However, there are few other solutions currently available in the networked environment in the current legislative climate.  Until the laws change, this is one of the few solutions.

Sustainability

	Current digital library research has been focused more on the "short-term now" than on the "long now." Digital library designers have been busy writing grants and learning new technologies, and issues of the long-term sustainability of their projects has rarely come under much consideration.  The world wide web is littered with the ghosts of dead web sites, an obvious reminder of the short-term thinking at the heart of much of our current electronic culture. It's perfectly understandable why sites from the early stages of the web have become obsolete; no one knew what was going to happen with the web, and many of the early experiments ended up without long-term value, or sustaining interest. However, there is little excuse for digital library designers in the present to fail to consider how their efforts will be sustained over the long-term.
	This is not to say that items of an ephemeral nature cannot be created in the electronic networked environment, or that all projects have to be designed to last a thousand years.  But too often, designers of digital libraries look only to the horizon of the funding source, and fail to set up methods by which their creation, which as we've seen, takes a tremendous amount of development and sustained labor, can continue to live and grow. 
	In designing TRAUMA, we've tried to consider its successful long-term sustainability at every turn. One of TRAUMA's core functionalities is to act as a long-term digital archive, so the long-term sustainability of the project has to be a primary concern from the very beginning.  We have identified three broad areas, social, technological and environmental/economic sustainability,  which need to be addressed in order to assure that TRAUMA will remain viable for years to come.  

Social Sustainability

	Social sustainability implies that a social structure can be built around TRAUMA in which people (users and creators) will remain interested in maintaining the archive.  This also includes the idea of bringing TRAUMA under more established institutional control to guarantee that the social structure of support will remain.  
	One way that social sustainability can be maintained is by having an active user community working to maintain TRAUMA.  An active user and contributor base will continue to make TRAUMA viable and fresh.  However, we have encounter differences of opinion on how the contribution function of TRAUMA can be structured to provide this social sustainability.  TRAUMA is acting as a long-term archive, and as such, the materials that it preserves and makes accessible have to have a certain degree of authenticity and reliability.  In traditional archives, this is done by monitoring the provenance of archival materials as they enter the archive, and then guaranteeing their continued authenticity through the protective functions of the archive itself.  
	These types of behaviors mutate a bit in the digital environment, and they are especially constrained in a contribution atmosphere that makes it possible for a number of people to make contributions to the archive.  There is considerable tension at this point where traditional archival functions meet those of the sharium, and we are still working out where TRAUMA will stand on the issue.  In order to allow community members to contribute samples of their digital audio, for example (and to make it possible for TRAUMA to accept it without having to constantly fix errors) a fairly detailed set of protocols will need to be written providing detailed information on how to create digital graphic files, the file formats, the resolution, equipment, etc., to ensure that some quality control standards will remain.  Otherwise, the authenticity and reliability of the material will come into question.  However, TRAUMA has to remember that stringent quality control requirements may cause significant barriers to arise between community members and TRAUMA.  If it is too complicated for people to contribute, they probably won't.  
	Additionally, a number of musicians queried about TRAUMA continued to express concern about the availability of copyrighted material in the electronic networked environment.  One of the debates within TRAUMA is how archival-quality master material will be made available to patrons.  One view is that this material should be made available to all (it is still covered under the Creative Commons licenses); the second view is that this material should only be made available to "serious" researchers (a category of user still to be determined) and that a higher level of access to these archival materials should be required. In many ways, this second view is designed to allay the concerns of the creators of the material and to encourage them to share at least some of themselves in the electronic networked environment.
	These are a few of the issues involved, but the crux of social sustainability when considering the contribution function is that a distributed community of users and contributors can allow a digital library to attain a substantial degree of social sustainability through regular use.
	Another method that TRAUMA could secure its social sustainability would be to have it come under the care of an established archival organization that would continue to provide the social support it would need to remain operational.  We deal with established archives more completely in the Environmental/Economic section below, but a brief mention of them is appropriate here. Established archives have a built-in social world which revolves around them, and depending on the moral authority with which they are invested, they can have a substantial influence on the quality perception of the organizations under their care. 

Technological Sustainability

	A more difficult prospect is to continue to grow as technology grows.  As with the Perseus digital library, TRAUMA needs content experts who are passionate about the content of TRAUMA, but it also needs technologists who continue to see how the latest technological advances will benefit TRAUMA and its users.  While we are attempting to develop TRAUMA with advanced technology, we still feel that we're coming up a bit short, mainly due to our own technological short-comings, and the limited time to actually implement the DL.  Not only will TRAUMA need technologists, but it will need wise technology decisions to be made to ensure that its technology base will be adaptable over time.  For example, due to current time constraints the database architecture of TRAUMA was built using Microsoft Access.  An open-source software solution is much-preferred for the long-term, and indeed, research in that area will be pursue actively.

Environmental/Economic Sustainability

	Economic sustainability has been one of the most elusive concepts for experimental DLs up to this point in the history of the web.  Many of the earliest experiments, except for the highest-profile and the best-funded, have grown weeds and are danger of extinction.  It's easy to see how DL creators can become addicted to the life-support provided by short-term grant funding, but it's apparent at this point that more long-term thinking needs to take place as DL creators consider how their resources are going to survive beyond the limit of the funding period. 
	TRAUMA could be its own funding source, and create its own methods for funding by utilizing volunteer labor (Library School students, college radio people) and the other methods that non-profits utilize to keep themselves afloat.  It could possibly sustain itself for quite a while this way, as long as the social network surrounding it remains viable (making its social sustainability even more important). 
	Bringing TRAUMA under the support of an established funding/archival organization is another method of providing for its economic sustainability. This solution might seem hypocritical considering our earlier attacks on the current archive system, but it can also be a positive solution if the incorporation of TRAUMA into an established organization is recognition by the established organization of the imperative of the mission of TRAUMA.  An organization such as the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (SFC), is a model for the type of organization that should be interested in the material that TRAUMA has to offer.  However, the budgetary and staff constraints in traditional archives mentioned earlier may make it difficult for  organizations such as the SFC to bring new resources such as TRAUMA on board.  We can only hope that the floodgates of funding to preserve our endangered digital resources will open soon.

Assessment

	The building of the TRAUMA digital library has been a learning process, as it was designed to be. The unfortunate aspect of this particular learning process was the realization that the creation of a digital library such as TRAUMA is full of peril, and that the scope of the endeavor is great.  The positive aspect of recognizing the tremendous work involved in building such a digital library is that it makes the designers reconsider their goals at every turn.  This process of reconsideration and reevaluation makes the ultimate product stronger. It can also be discouraging, but in this instance it has just strengthened the designers resolve to try and bring TRAUMA through to a positive conclusion. 
	One disappointment with the current prototype of TRAUMA is that many of the idealized functionalities proposed at the beginning of the project failed to be realized.  Pictorial search based on recommendations; music information retrieval based on audio information; an entirely open-source architecture; a resolution of capabilities of contribution; these are just an example of areas where the ideas were bigger than out capabilities.  However, in exploring the possibilities of making these added features a reality in TRAUMA, we've come to a greater understanding of the processes involved and we have resolved to continuing pursuing the areas that we feel are most important to make TRAUMA a useful long-term archive.
	Copyright issues continue to be one of the main impediments to successfully implementing TRAUMA.  Despite advantages of the Creative Commons licenses, there is still suspicion on the parts of the artists that information in the networked environment is information ripe for the stealing.  Musicians are still unsure about how their interests can be protected once their material are widely available outside of the traditional economic systems.  We know of little substantive research on the subject of how the wide distribution of electronic resources can actually benefit the musician through increased exposure, though we have discovered anecdotal evidence which supports this.  Unfortunately, this anecdotal evidence is overwhelmed by the information raining down by advocacy organizations such as the RIAA which posits that the ready availability of "free" digital files has significantly hurt the sales of recording artists. The reality is undoubtedly somewhere in the middle of these two views, but the musicians, who are really the ones in the middle, still have no clear idea of what to do, and are logically in the position of trying to protect their materials from infringement in order to support their own livelihood.  
	One problem for TRAUMA, and indeed, for other digital libraries of its ilk, is that technological and social advances cannot be made until these copyright issues are settled.  After recognizing the significant intellectual property issues involved in creating TRAUMA, intellectual resources that could have been applied towards research on technological issues were instead diverted to learning more about intellectual property issues.
	This has its positives, of course, in that the intellectual property issues surrounding digital libraries will be some of the most hotly contested in the near future, and knowledge of these issues will benefit us as we pursue our varied employment goals.   However, the barricades provided by the intellectual property issues prevent us from providing access to the material in a logical, interesting manner, and that is the ultimate goal of TRAUMA.  Hopefully those issues will be resolved in some manner in the near future so that the business of digital libraries can go back to providing access to the most interesting, important resources. 

Appendices (see attached sheets)

Appendix One: Paper Prototype from the contextual design process

Appendix Two-Eight: PowerPoint slides representing the combined paper protypes

Appendix Nine: MAPDI metadata elements data dictionary

Appendix Ten: SUMS Audio metadata data dictionary

References

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SUMS Audio References

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