For a digital audio reserves project, the library is almost always responsible for encoding the audio, uploading it to the server, and providing an interface for access.
Once a digital audio reserves project is up and running, most of the ongoing work involves digitizing and encoding the source recordings. Among the thirty-three respondents to the survey who answered questions about staffing, twenty-five (76 percent) report support staff are involved in digitization and encoding. Twenty-two (67 percent) use student assistants, usually in combination with support staff, although four libraries (12 percent) have only students working on recordings. Thirteen (39 percent) reported that a librarian is involved, and in four cases librarians do all of the digitization and encoding work.
For preservation projects and large digital audio reserves projects, the library may employee a full-time audio specialist to digitize and encode the audio.
Back in the days of tape-based reserve services, the responsibility for creating listening tapes rested with the instructor--or more commonly, with the instructor's teaching assistant--and the library simply handled the reproduction and circulation of the tapes. This model continues at several institutions who replied to the survey. Teaching faculty and staff create audio files for their listening lists and sometimes also mount them on a central server or on the course-management software site for their course. This is the exception to the norm, though, and although some faculty and staff prefer to have control over their curricular listening assignments, it is in the best interest of the students and the institution to have curricular listening services centralized to provide a uniform interface and uniform quality and to make sure intellectual property laws are observed.