A national home dedicated to children's literature had long been the dream of Elizabeth Hamill and Mary Briggs, whose vision was to place children, young people and their books at the core of the UK's national literary culture. Their wish was realised late last year when the multi-galleried Seven Stories opened in a Grade II listed Victorian flour mill in the riverside Regeneration and Conservation area of the Ouseburn Valley in Newcastle. The building was restored throughout 2005 at a cost of £6.5 million.
Tony Crossley, technical director at Tiger AV, said: "The Centre thrives on being able to offer exhibitions and visuals that make the original manuscripts come alive and AV was fundamental in making this happen."
The Centre is spread across seven storeys, but one of the most interactive areas is the 'The Engine Room', located on the first floor, which takes exhibition themes and invites visitors (of all ages) to explore their own creativity through play and hands-on exploration. Here visitors can record the creative process involved in making a children's book, via 'story pods' which were purpose-designed for the Centre by Tiger AV. This is where the Marantz Professional PMD570 comes into its own. "The Education Officer wanted to have the ability to create an archive of the children telling their own stories, and we pondered how we could implement this," explained Crossley. "Recording onto a compact flash card is easy - but we had to think about the mechanics of how it could operate in an unsupervised way."
Tiger AV's solution was to create a simple traffic-light scenario. Depressing the light that is flashing activates a voice-over, presenting audio information to the children via headphones, and instructing them to press a button to commence recording onto the 1Gb CF card in the PMD570. Various failsafes are built in and there is the option to re-record and play their story back via a listening booth.
Sensing that the PMD570 would deliver broadcast-quality audio Tiger AV have used high-quality boundary mics and preamps to preserve the signal. "We set up a PC with card reader and software, and at the end of every day the CF card is removed, the data archived onto a hard disk and the blank card re-inserted."Crossley opted for the Marantz device principally "because it would do the job, because we have always had a great relationship with parent company D&M Professional, and because we trusted its reliability." Another reason was because of its RS-232 compatibility. "It had to be RS-232 controllable to interface with the AMX AV system controller, which we programmed in-house."
Finally, he says, the PMD570's instant playback facility was also essential. "It was important that once they had finished recording, the children could play it back immediately - and both record and playback are instant with this machine."
(Lee Baldock)
