CHARM sound search engine

Posted by Gavin Brockis on Friday 19 March 2010 at 3:00pm
Tags: analogue collections | digital collections | digital preservation | digitisation | finding audio | repositories | sound recordings

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A new music repository from King’s College London, the CHARM Sound File Search engine allows the user to browse and search a library of around 5,000 individual sides of 78s, digitised to a high standard.

The Centre for History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM) has been busy with their Transfer Project, digitising and cataloguing a section of their archive of 150,000 78rpm records, and the first stage of their project has just gone online. Their repository offers a flexible search engine, streaming MP3 and downloadable FLAC options, as well as a thorough metadata schema including photographs of disc labels and full technical records of the digitisation process. The site also documents some of the technical workflow used in digitising these artefacts, and explains decisions on choosing which items to digitise, digital restoration policy, and target file formats.

The search engine also accesses the JISC funded Musicians of Britain and Ireland, 1900-1950 project - an extension to the original CHARM transfer project.

CHARM Sound File Search presents a high quality and well conceived resource, and it’s a great example of how to execute an audio digitisation project, as well as a fascinating archive of less common early recordings.

We have just added CHARM to the history section of our newly-published advice document Finding Subject-Specific Digital Media Resources.

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