About the FCL

Frankston City Libraries offers membership to its community with access to a wide range of popular and bestselling books, newspapers, magazines, movies, music, and lots more.

The community is also able to discover the past through the Library’s extensive collection of local history resources covering the greater Frankston area.

Their challenge

Frankston Library had a collection of physical video and audio tapes in its local history collection. The content represents significant value for the local area and the Library wanted to provide better community access to the collection as well as making sure the collection was properly preserved for the long-term.

The Library recognised it could not achieve its objectives with the content living on physical formats.

The collection

80 audio cassettes tapes and 12 videotapes of mixed duration.

How DAMsmart helped make the content accessible

We worked with the Library team to establish the appropriate digital deliverables to meet its access and preservation objectives.

The collection was sent to our Canberra digitisation facility, where it was securely maintained for the duration of the project.

The content was transformed into a digital collection using BWF 24bit/48KHz for audio preservation, in line with the IASA TC-04 standard, and MP3 for access. Video content was delivered back using Lossless JPEG2000.MXF for preservation, IMX30 for reproduction purposes and an H.264 file for access. All formats underwent rigorous manual and file-based quality checking programs to ensure the integrity of the content, and included the creation of checksums to assist with digital preservation.

For the audio component, we undertook digital clean up work. This process focused on improving the listening experience for the end user. Silences and gaps were removed as well as removing other noises like humming.

The collection was archived to hard drive and sent back to the Library at the completion of the project.