Over seventy-five million Americans listen to podcasts every month, and the average weekly listener spends over six hours tuning into podcasts from the more than thirty million podcast episodes currently available. Yet despite the excitement over podcasting, the sounds of podcasting’s nascent history are vulnerable and they remain mystifyingly difficult to research and preserve. Podcast feeds end abruptly, cease to be maintained, or become housed in proprietary databases, which are difficult to search with any rigor. Podcasts might seem to be highly available everywhere, but it’s necessary to preserve and analyze these resources now, or scholars will find themselves writing, researching, and thinking about a past they can’t fully see or hear. This collection gathers the expertise of leading and emerging scholars in podcasting and digital audio in order to take stock of podcasting’s recent history and imagine future directions for the format. Essays trace some of the less amplified histories of the format and offer discussions of some of the hurdles podcasting faces nearly twenty years into its existence. Using their experiences building and using the PodcastRE database—one of the largest publicly accessible databases for searching and researching podcasts—the volume editors and contributors reflect on how they, as media historians and cultural researchers, can best preserve podcasting’s booming audio cultures and the countless voices and perspectives podcasting adds to our collective soundscape.

Provides the basic, practical information needed to plan and implement sound collections care programs or incorporate preservation principles into an existing program.

Special libraries are facing increasing challenges today. The bigfgest challenge before them is how to demonstrate that they are the best source of specialized information despite reliance on the web for information. Special libraries therefore need to change in terms of their collections, roles, services and evolve strategies for managing the change. Preservation refers to the set of activities that aims to prolong the life of a record and relevant metadata, or enhance its value, or improve access to it through noninterventive means. This includes actions taken to influence records creators prior to selection and acquisition. The purpose of preservation is to ensure protection of information of enduring value for access by present and future generations. Libraries and archives have served as the central institutional focus for preservation, and both types of institutions include preservation as one of their core functions. In recent decades, many major libraries and archives have established formal preservation programs for traditional materials which include regular allocation of resources for preservation, preventive measures to arrest deterioration of materials, remedial measures to restore the usability of selected materials, and the incorporation of preservation needs and requirements into overall program planning. This book attempts to provide all basic aspects of digital library in an authentic but simple style. It describes the revolutionary changes brought out by digital libraries in the entire concept of library organisation, managements and operations. It also discusses the challenges emerging due to the adoption of newer technologies.

In recent decades, the importance of sound for remembering the past and for creating a sense of belonging has been increasingly acknowledged. We keep "sound souvenirs" such as cassette tapes and long play albums in our attics because we want to be able to recreate the music and everyday sounds we once cherished. Artists and ordinary listeners deploy the newest digital audio technologies to recycle past sounds into present tunes. Sound and memory are inextricably intertwined, not just through the commercially exploited nostalgia on oldies radio stations, but through the exchange of valued songs by means of pristine recordings and cultural practices such as collecting, archiving and listing. This book explores several types of cultural practices involving the remembrance and restoration of past sounds. At the same time, it theorizes the cultural meaning of collecting, recycling, reciting, and remembering sound and music.