Rigler and Deutsch Record Index project at Stanford, revisited

ABSTRACT
The original 1980s RDI project's final report describes work carried out among five institutions -- the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library, plus those at Stanford, Syracuse, and Yale universities. They worked as members of the Associated Audio Archives Committee under the auspices of the Association of Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC). [see: the last URL under RELATED ITEM below]

The 1980s project, based on considerable prior work, set out to create preliminary bibliographic access and control over the pre-LP (aka 78 rpm) commercial disc sound recordings in the five organization's sound archives by using data entry personnel with no cataloging or discographic expertise. They keyboarded label names, issue/matrix numbers, authors/composers, titles, performers, and institutional identifiers, plus microfilm roll and frame numbers taken from projected images of the discs.

Those projected images came from high-resolution microfilm copies of photographs taken on-site at each of the archives using specially modified, computer-controlled cameras developed uniquely for the project. An individual metadata record was created for each side of a disc, and those records were sorted into multiple indexes and then published on microfiche.

This SDR collection documents the "RDI at Stanford revisited" project that recovered nearly all the original 1980s metadata, converted the Stanford microfilm images of discs into TIFFs, and linked those digital images to present-day catalog records at Stanford via persistent URLs.

CONTENTS:
All the links seen below under RELATED ITEM are associated with this collection. The first four are text files providing access to:
[1] an article-length "Project description"
[2] a more fully documented "Technical report"
[3] a data and tools map of "Sources and products" and
[4] a sketch outline of "How to search" the resources associated with this project.

For these four text files, download your choice of document into an empty folder in your computing environment and unZIP the contents into that empty folder. The results will be a PDF document and a set of subfolders that will be accessed via the links found by opening and reading the PDF file. Be sure to review the "ReadMeFirst" section.

Link number [5] provides access to the file "RDI-jpegsFromTIFFs.zip", a 592 GByte copy of JPEG label-only images extracted from the 4.2 TByes of TIFFs that were themselves converted from the 1980s microfilm images of Stanford's holdings. This ZIP file contains 270,715 images in 114 folders. See the data and tools map of "Sources and products" under "Products: 3. JPEG images" for more details about this file.

The URL in in the next-to-last link points to a *.TAR archive of all four of the project's text files (it does NOT include the very large "RDI-jpegsFromTIFFs.zip" file).