The paper presents three significant examples of work done at MIRAGE which cover the spectrum of the various issues that confront anyone dealing with audio preservation and restoration work: 1) the work leading to preservative and access copies for the Archivio Storico del Teatro Regio in Parma was a mass preservation enterprise, where the most urgent need was to save the documents; as a consequence economic‐organizational strategies of an industrial nature and systematic control procedures were used, processing a large number of documents in a short time. This work actually entailed defining and applying stringent operating protocols for the control of workflows, which could also be extended to other collections of audio documents; 2) the work done on the tapes from the Luigi Nono Archive in Venice underscores the issues related to ‘hybrid’ audio documents, bordering between sound journal, preparatory materials and the electronic artwork, which meant that critical reviews of the sources were necessary in order to highlight the relationships between use and Work recordings; 3) last but not least, the ‘museumification’ work on audio recordings from the Riccardo and Fernanda Pivano Library in Milan, completed on the occasion of the exhibition Voci‐Voices (Treviso 2004), outlining the path leading to a sound journal of inestimable cultural value for the public at large.
