What am I doing these days?

Perhaps a dull post, but a worthwhile one- what on earth am I being paid for nowadays?

Radio Digital Archive is something I'm taking on next month- it's a fairly straightforward project to capture a small proportion of Radio 3 and 4 output and get it into properly searchable archives completely digitally. In spite of it's limited ambitions there are some real challenges though, largely due to the mix of legacy kit involved. Um, legacy sounds like it's ancient, which it isn't. It's more that the kit for the radio networks has all been installed slightly differently for each network, and the metadata in particular (the stuff that let's you know what you're looking at/listening to) varys in slight but significant ways. Anyway, it's great to be getting back into the heart of the BBC's real ops again.

Meanwhile the extramural projects continue- Prestospace (you remember, the big EU funded project) has been busy ish- we held a couple of training/briefing days for archives this month, at the Globe theatre and at Kings Colledge. Between the two events we spoke directly to over sixty archives from across the UK and europe, and explored all sorts of issues from project planning and funding to figuring out whether to use disk or data tape to store your assets.

Next week the two DTI projects we applied for kick off- Yes we got funding (horray!). Bugger, there's only me to work on them (and I've now got RDA too!). Our kick off meetings are in Havant Monday and Tuesday, then Wednesday it's this conference at the IET , which is likely to be extremely interesting, but I am very much concerned that I won't have a clue what to say. I've got the second presentation slot I think, talking about what archives want out of multimedia formats. Quite.

Friday next week will be great though- Matthew Addis and I are off to Dublin to run a workshop for the 'British and Irish Sound Archives' looking at managing preservation projects. It's the last jaunt I've got before the RDA thing means I'm not mean't to do conferences, so I intend to make the most of it.