Digital Archive Center for Music

Overview

    Founded in September 2004 and appointed as a college-level institution in October 2010, the Digital Archive Center for Music (DACM) is the first digital music archive in music colleges in Taiwan. At the time of establishment, DACM’s primary mission was to assist departments and graduate institutes of the College of Music in the recording of important activities and the digitalization of historical archives. Since 2005, however, we have started to partake in a number of National Science and Technology for e-Learning and Digital Archives Programs, and we are now actively participating in national and international conferences and workshops to promote academic exchanges. We have advanced professional audio-video recording equipment and post-production editing system, multi-camera field production system for live-concert filming, multimedia server with shared storage and independent server rooms. Personnel-wise, we recruit graduate assistants from the College of Music who possess digital music archiving skills. Over the years since its establishment, DACM has taken parts in large-scale digital archive programs, trained experts, established partner networks and hosted international exchange activities; it has built professional server rooms and purchased advanced audio-visual archiving equipment with subsidies from the university. Up to now, the NTNU College of Music has created an all-around work environment for digital music archiving.

Research Sections

Research and Development Section

Main duties:

1. Plan research projects; apply for and implement digital archive projects.
2. Construct and maintain the DACM digital archive.
3. Host forums, seminars, workshops and conferences.
4. Publish project results on international associations of music archives and promote international academic exchanges and collaborations.

Multimedia Section

Main duties:

1. Undertake audio-visual recording and archiving for concerts and other activities hosted by the departments and graduate institutes in the College of Music.
2. Undertake and implement audio- and video-related activities commissioned by internal and external organizations.
3. Supervise DACM’s facilities for professional digital archiving and multimedia applications.
4. Promote value-added innovations and applications of the archive.

Facilities

Powered by experts in multiple fields including information technology, system management, web engineering, visual art, library and information and music application, the Digital Archive Center for Music Back Office Management System is an information platform which incorporates high-end hardware and database-driven management interface. The server room was built in November 2006, where servers housed in three 42U Standard Racks operate in air-conditioned environment of constant temperature and humidity, with backup power supply from two online UPSs.

The front office system includes a service platform operated and backed up by five servers and, most importantly, the Digital Archive Search Service. When the Search Service is used, information is transferred between the front office and the database through a middle-office relay platform. We adopt the latest high-end network-attached storage system for our meta-database, supported with backup tape autoloaders and a highly scalable modular disk storage array that can consolidate up to 45 SAS and SATA disk drives. An additional backup system and an editing workstation located in a remote server room on the NTNU Main Campus are connected to the Digital Archive System server room using the university’s fiber-optical network, which is further connected through the Taiwan Academic Network (TANet) to the worldwide web.

Digital Archive Center for Music

Address: 2F., No. 31, Shida Rd., Da’an Dist., Taipei City
TEL: 02-77495449
E-mail: dacm@deps.ntnu.edu.tw 
Website: http://dacm.ntnu.edu.tw