Scope and Organization

In summer 2005, John Anderies approached me about working with him on writing a book for librarians on digital audio and digital audio services. Because of other commitments, John wasn't able to see the project to its end, but the scope and organization of this text is the product of the planning we did together in fall 2005. John also drafted a few sections of this document, and for these his byline is indicated in the heading.

This draft is an incomplete realization of the book John and I had planned. We had worked out a tight deadline for writing the book, because we knew that the rapid changes in digital audio would mean that the parts of the book would become obsolete quickly. Once John realized he would not be able to finish the project, I decided that if the sections I had written were to be of any use at all to readers, the text needed dissemination quickly. There would be no time for me to complete the book on my own or to bring another author into the project. For these reasons, I decided to deposit the book in ScholarlyCommons@Penn (http://repository.upenn.edu) under a Creative Commons license, so that others could make use of my work and perhaps even build upon it.

The book is intended to serve as a guide and reference for librarians who are responsible for implementing digital audio services in their libraries. In the treatment of technological matters, I have tried to keep the novice in mind as the primary reader, but I also hope that a librarian approaching the book with some knowledge of digital sound technology will find the content valuable as a reference.

The book was written to serve several purposes:

• to introduce the concepts of digital sound recording technology
• to compare various common digital audio formats and offer guidance on their strengths and weaknesses
• to describe the process of encoding and compressing sound
• to explain the various ways sound can be delivered and listened to over networks
• to survey current practices in digital audio services in libraries

This book is divided into two parts. Part 1, ``Digital Audio Technology,'' covers the fundamentals of recorded sound and digital audio, including a description of digital audio formats, how digital audio is delivered to the listener, and how digital audio is created. Part 2, ``Digital Audio in the Library,'' covers digitizing local collections, providing streaming audio reserves, and using digital audio to preserve analog recordings.

The appendix offers resources on copyright issues affecting digital audio services, and the book concludes with a glossary, bibliography, and index.