A protocol for the preservation of speech documents archives: towards the digital curation of the Carta dei Dialetti Italiani

The speech audio documents are in danger of disappearing, because of the poor quality of the material on which they were recorded and the rapid evolution of the recording formats. Moreover, the speech recordings were often made with non-professional systems or in fieldwork circumstances (i.e. with low quality), and in particular cases even risk being forgotten, due to widespread lack of well-established archiving procedures. The paper will describe the protocols defined in some projects carried out by the authors (with particular attention to the project focusing on Carta dei Dialetti Italiani, a unique open reels archive of Italian dialects). The experimental results prove the effectiveness of the preservation protocol defined by the authors.