IASA's 55th Annual Conference

In a time of budget constraints across heritage projects worldwide, the preservation of sound collections is becoming an increasing challenge, especially for archives without existing digitisation solutions.

At the same time, advances in technology present opportunities to deviate from ‘traditional’ digitisation systems – the hardware and software commonly associated with audio production and preservation.

In response to this changing economic and technological environment, we have been investigating the potential of a low-cost and versatile solution for audio digitisation using the Raspberry Pi single-board computer.

We will share our findings about the viability, capability and utility of a low-cost, ARM Linux-based audio digitisation workstation to enable archives to achieve preservation-standard transfers without the overheads of a typical desktop computer system.