2020 IASA - FIAT/IFTA Joint Conference

The Glastonbury Festival donated the 2003 – 2006 competition entries for their New bands Competition to the British Library for long-term preservation; the collection totals over 4000 optical discs, primarily Compact Disc-Recordable (CD-R).  The New Bands Competition is run as part of the annual music festival and gives unsigned bands/musicians the opportunity to submit their demo recordings to a panel of judges, who then select their favourites to perform at the summer festival.  The collection was transferred to a stable file-based format in 2019, as part of the Library's ambitious Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project.  

The migration of the collection presented many challenges, and contradictions - being optical media, large parts of the workflow could be automated, the data extracted verifiably bit-perfect and faster than real time. However as the collection is populated by poor-quality CD-R stock with many examples written in low-quality domestic burners, the data was not easily extractable in many cases and we had to develop a multi-stage workflow that could rip large quantities of discs without problem, while being easily adjustable to accommodate 1:1 transfer of severely degraded discs.

Our paper will outline the step-by-step workflow and the hardware/software employed, including tools developed in-house, to successfully extract and preserve this unique content.  The collection represents a wonderful snap-shot of the British music scene in the early 2000s, which has now been fully preserved, and adds further re-enforcement that optical media is not a stable storage medium.