In response to the proposal of digitizing the entire back-run of several European audio archives, many research
projects have been carried out in order to discover the technical issues involved in making
prestigious audio documents digitally available, which are related to the A/D transfer process and supervised
metadata extraction. This paper gives an innovative approach to metadata extraction from such a complex
source material. The paper also describes the protocols defined, the processes undertaken, the results
ascertained from several audio documents preservation projects and the techniques used. In addition, a number
of recommendations are given for the re-recording process, aimed at minimizing the information loss and to
automatically measure the unintentional alterations introduced by the A/D equipment.
