Business sector

Government

Summary

Retrieval and conversion of recorded legislative sessions for State of Colorado

Keywords

Lanier, Eyretel, DDS tape, Data Recovery

Business Drivers

Migrating off legacy systems, Recovering data off of damaged media, Maintaining compliance

The Challenge

The Colorado State Archives (“CSA”) is charged with maintaining a permanent record of all public state government sessions and activity. Between 1997-2001, the Colorado legislature recorded all of its sessions on a Lanier LDL848 voice recorder (a re‐nameplated Eyretel E1000 recorder). These DDS-2 recordings had been in storage for over 20 years and the tapes were slowly deteriorating. The original recording equipment was long gone.

Solution Overview

CSA chose XOVOX to retrieve and convert the audio and per-call metadata from these tapes. XOVOX was picked because of its deep experience with Eyretel tapes. Given the age and condition of the tapes, XOVOX used XTRACT and Custom Services to do the work.

With XTRACT, XOVOX:

• retrieved thousands of hours of recorded legislative sessions from the tapes and converted them to WAV files – a common format that can be played on any modern platform; and
• recovered the metadata – including start/stop timestamps, duration, and recorder channel number – and formatted this for import into the Colorado archive system, per the CSA’s specifications.

Using XOVOX Custom Services, XOVOX recovered data from several damaged tapes which had developed bad spots while in storage, successfully recovering 99% of the data.

The Result

CSA accomplished its mission of restoring the audio of prioritized legislative sessions from 1997-2001. XOVOX created a more efficient and user-friendly way for the State of Colorado and its community to use/access data from that time period, while also helping the State fulfill its regulatory requirements. CSA continues to entrust XOVOX with the restoration of additional legislative session audio.

Testimonial

“XOVOX helped us meet our state’s requirements for documenting and retaining government proceedings. From the start, we were confident we had picked the right company to do this job. Their knowledge, thoroughness and professionalism were great. And we will call on them again.”

Aly Jabrocki, MLIS, CA
Director and State Archivist, Colorado State Archives