The Glastonbury New Bands Competition Collection at the British Library: Technical challenges of migrating an optical disk collection

Abstract

The Glastonbury Festival kindly donated the 2004–2009 entries for its Emerging Talent Competition to the British Library for long-term preservation. The collection comprises more than 4,000 optical disks, primarily Compact Disk-Recordable (CD-R), and was migrated to a stable file-based format in 2019, as part of the Library’s Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project. Migration presented many challenges — while large parts of the workflow could be automated, and the audio data extracted verifiably bit-perfect and faster than real time, the collection is populated by poor-quality CD-R stock with many examples written using low-quality domestic burners, making the process of data extraction significantly more complex. The Library not only had to develop a multi-stage workflow with sufficient capacity to process the large quantity of disks in an efficient manner, but the workflow also had to be easily adjustable to accommodate the 1:1 transfer of severely damaged or degraded disks. This paper outlines the step-by-step technical workflow and the hardware/software employed to extract this unique content for long-term preservation.