Abstract
This article presents a methodology for the active preservation of, and the access to, magnetic tapes of audio archives. The methodology has been defined and implemented by a multidisciplinary team involving engineers as well as musicians, composers and archivists. The strong point of the methodology is the philological awareness that influenced the development of digital tools, which consider the critical questions in the historian and musicologist’s approach: the secondary information and the history of transmission of an audio document. © 2017, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.