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Media and File Formats

What media do we accept?

We will accept materials on virtually any medium: audio, video, text, photographs, illustrations, etc. Please be sure your materials are carefully padded so they don't get broken in the mail. And please include either the metadata forms on paper, or enough information for us to locate the metadata you entered online. We need, at a minimum, your name and contact information, the name of the language, a title for each individual item on each tape or disk (each story, track, chapter, etc.), and the name of the speaker or author of each item.

Audio recordings: We are equipped to digitize audio recordings on any medium: reel-to-reel tapes, cassette tapes, mini-disks, DAT tapes, or CDs. If you want to digitize your own recordings, please consult the section below about digitization standards and file formats.

Video recordings: We are not currently equipped to process video recordings in the AILLA lab, but if you send us video cassette tapes, we can digitize them in another lab on campus. We can easily handle digital video materials.

Texts created on computers may be submitted on diskettes, CDs, zip disks, or DVDs. Please tell us which platform (Windows98, MacOS8.5, etc.) and software (Word6.0, Shoebox2.0, etc.) you used to create the files, so we can use the appropriate reader. It's best to write this information on the disk or CD.

Manuscripts of any kind are also welcome, including notebooks, copies of unpublished articles, and even boxes of file slips. We will scan these and archive them as PDF files.

Photographs and illustrations: Digital graphics files can be submitted on any media (see Text files). Original works will be treated like manuscripts.

Digital files can be transferred to us by FTP, by contacting AILLA staff

Digital file formats

AILLA uses standard file formats for the various media supported by the archive. All of these formats can be viewed or listened to using free software. Generally, we will produce two versions of each archived resource, one in an uncompressed format that best preserves the original information, and one in a compressed format that is easier to download.

Audio files are archived in two formats: the uncompressed .wav format and compressed .mp3 format. Wav files are standard as input to many transcription and analysis programs (see Links). MP3 files can be listened to with a variety of free players. Both of these formats are available for downloading from the AILLA site. Wav files tend to be very large - a 10 minute recording produces a .wav file of about 46 Megabytes and a .mp3 file of about 1Megabyte. The MP3 format is perfectly adequate for transcription and analyses above the phonetic level.

Text files are archived in two formats: the original format (Word, WordPerfect, Shoebox, etc.) and in Adobe's Portable Document Format - .pdf. Pdf files can easily be downloaded and read using the Adobe Acrobat Reader, but they can not be edited. The original format files will be saved in the archive, but not made available for general access. We can make them available with explicit permission from the author and/or depositor.

Manuscript files are scannned and archived as .pdf files only.

We haven't yet determined the best format for video files.

Digital graphical files, including photographs and drawings, will be archived in both the original format in which they were deposited and the compressed .jpeg format. Non-digital photographs and illustrations are scanned and archived in both the uncompressed .tiff format and the compressed .jpeg format.

Original media are sent to the Indiana Archive of Traditional Music for permanent safekeeping.

Digitization standards

Audio files are digitized at a bit depth of 24 and a sample rate of 44,000 Mhz using ProTools Digi001 software. We may filter obvious persistent tape hiss and boost the gain of recordings made at low volumes, but we do not otherwise process or alter the original sound.

We also make a 1-minute sample file in the .mp3 format of any audio file that is more than 10 minutes long. That way users can find out if it's the sort of thing they want before spending a lot of time downloading it.