Toward an informed procedural approach to the preservation of audio documents: The case of the "Fondazione Arena di Verona" archive

Intangibility distinguishes recorded acoustic events from other cultural materials, because of the the dichotomy between the physical restoration of the carrier and the far more complex ``restoration of the experience''. In this sense, audio documents require specific methodologies for preserving and presenting the acoustic information and its related metadata. Much of the collective audio patrimony is stored in medium and small size public and private archives, which seldom dispose of the financial and human resources to adopt articulated methodologies as defined by the scientific community, resulting in poor and undocumented preservation campaigns that produce unreliable collections of documents which are hard to access and useless for academic studies. This article presents the experience of the research project REVIVAL, aimed at the preservation of the audio documents stored in the archive of the Fondazione Arena di Verona, Italy, with a focus on sustainable protocols for quality control and automation, as well knowledge transfer and personnel training.