The Library of Princeton Theological Seminary proposes a twelve-month project to outsource the digitization of 1,900 reel-to-reel tapes of the radio program The Twentieth Century Reformation Hour (1960 to 1980), hosted by Carl McIntire. McIntire was a pastor, founder of a Christian denomination and seminary, editor of the Christian Beacon newspaper, and founder and president of the American Council of Christian Churches. These are the only known tapes of the radio broadcasts of McIntire and his pioneering radio ministry, serving as an irreplaceable witness into the development of conservative talk radio and its use of popular broadcast media in the United States. The proposed project would complement Yale Divinity School’s work to digitize McIntire’s newspaper, Christian Beacon. The digitized files would be made available to researchers remotely and on-site, supporting future research into the conservative Christian influence on American life and politics in the mid-twentieth century.

Our yearlong pilot project entails preserving, digitizing and publishing a gift collection of original recorded interviews with 278 civil rights leaders, activists, women’s rights leaders, politicians and Vietnam War veterans from the Sixties, making these historic materials broadly available to researchers and the public. Once the audio interviews are converted from microcassettes to digital files, Binghamton University Libraries will hire five students from the Equal Opportunity Program (EOP) on campus to participate in an internship, in which they will prepare metadata for the files and do minor editing on them. In the future, another cohort of students will select excerpts from the digital files and combine them with photographs, short biographies of the individuals interviewed, and other educational content and bring the files to publication as Open Educational Resources (OERs).

The Archives of Iowa Broadcasting (AIB), in partnership with George Blood, L.P. and Northeast Document Conservation Center, will reformat 347 transcription discs of radio broadcasts created between 1938 and 1961 by WHO radio of Des Moines, Iowa. WHO is a 50,000-watt NBC affiliate radio station that began broadcasting in April 1924. The materials selected for this project include programs related to Iowa farming, children’s entertainment, sporting events, political speeches, special events such as the Iowa State Fair and the Iowa Centennial, and interviews with soldiers and reports from the front during World War II by local reporters Herb Plambeck and Jack Shelley. The WHO transcription discs present many important research themes with broad regional and national appeal, and would be valuable to scholars from a variety of disciplines, as well as students, K-12 educators, broadcasters and many others.

Duke University Libraries seeks support for digitizing 88 quarter - inch open-reel tapes from the Radio Haiti Collection. An NEDCC assessment notes that twelve have an acetate base and suffer moderate to severe spoking, cupping, and brittleness. Seventy-six are Scotch 206 tapes with magnetic coating separation. The necessary intensive remediation is beyond the funding of our NEH-funded project. We will describe the digitized recordings in Haitian Creole, French, and English, and make them available available through a Duke website created for the larger collection. The tapes, representing the unique recorded legacy of Radio Haiti, have significant research and social value. Under the leadership of station directors Jean Dominique and Michèle Montas, Radio Haiti was a voice of social change and democracy, speaking out against oppression while advocating for human rights and celebrating Haitian culture and heritage.

The Drexel University Audio Archives (DUAA) seeks $26,703 for the migration and preservation of 146 Digital Audio Tapes (DAT) from the Sigma Sound Studios Collection (SSSC). These tapes are identified as an at-risk format in urgent need of data migration. The Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) will be contracted to perform the migration through a 100%-attended preservation strategy using a strict adherence to International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) and Federal Agency Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) standards. These tapes contain significant music productions from Philadelphia during the 1990s, as well as previous preservation migrations of earlier analog media. Access to these types of production recordings is unique to academic archives and provides valuable resources to music and humanities scholars.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives will digitize 250 transcription discs, which date between 1920 and 1950. These discs document programming from WHA, or Wisconsin Public Radio. Wisconsin Public Radio first broadcast in 1917, making it the oldest public radio station and one of the oldest continuously broadcasting radio stations in the United States. Early broadcasts included educational content for farmers as well as home economics. The Farm Program evolved throughout the 1920s, and in 1929 the station began airing a separate Homemaker’s Program, aimed at Wisconsin women, particularly those in rural areas. Our current project focuses on content from the Farm Program and the Homemakers Program. We also plan to digitize 4-H programs and 100 discs of Wisconsin Yarns, a program that dramatized Wisconsin folklore. The UW-Madison Archives holds 7,000 transcription discs; this project will serve as a pilot study for future digitization.

This pilot project aims to digitize, catalog, preserve and provide access to a sampling of camera-original U-matic videotapes within the “Alaska Review” collection in the Alaska Film Archives (AFA) of the Alaska and Polar Regions Collections & Archives at University of Alaska Fairbanks. “Alaska Review,” a publicly-funded television newsmagazine program airing in Alaska from 1976 to 1987, covered major issues facing the young state. AFA has digitized and cataloged all 63 edited broadcast programs and made segments publicly accessible online (http://bit.ly/1XASERv). AFA now aims to digitize 15% (300) of the approximately 2,000 camera-original U-matic videotapes used in making “Alaska Review.” Grant funds will cover shipping and digitizing at a lab, lab assessment of current videotape condition, portable hard drives for file delivery, and a block of staff time for library cataloging. The Film Archivist will develop strategies for future projects to digitize and make accessible the remainder of collection videotapes.

This project proposes to digitize original recordings of sermons and addresses primarily of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, together with other speakers, delivered during services for The Free Synagogue held at Carnegie Hall in New York City from 1931-1942. Wise is considered among the most significant American religious leaders of the 20th century. Wise was an active communal leader, a vocal and vigorous advocate for social justice nationwide, and a leading voice against Nazism.(See appendix for a biographical entry on Wise). These sermons reflect Wise's passion for social justice and his efforts for gathering support for Jewish survival and rescue during the Nazi era. Recorded on 10 and 12-inch aluminum and glass discs, no other known copies of these sermons and addresses exist. In their current format they are inaccessible and increasingly in danger of being lost. Digital transfer is urgently needed to preserve and provide access to these rare recordings.

San Diego State University proposes to digitize 183 audio cassette tapes containing interviews with well-known contemporary American and postmodern writers conducted by Larry McCaffery, professor emeritus of English at San Diego State University (SDSU) and postmodern literary critic. Interviewees include innovative writers such as Raymond Federman, Mark Danielewski, Joanna Russ, Ursula LeGuin, Samuel Delany, David Foster Wallace, and more. These tapes provide insight into their writing processes and influences, and document McCaffery's unique interview process. The Larry McCaffery Papers are currently in the final phase of processing with the tapes arranged into their own subseries. This project will allow for the digitization of these interviews, which will be made freely available to the public via SDSU's digital platform and the collection finding aid. This resource will enhance research in postmodern literature, the literary interview, cyberpunk studies, contemporary American literature, science fiction, and American cultural studies.

The Julian P. Kanter Political Commercial Archive contains the largest collection of political commercials in the world; more than 119,000 television and radio ads are found in our searchable online catalog. The radio dates to the late 1930's and the moving image dates to the 1950's. The Archive seeks to clean and transfer its 16mm color film collection for preservation. This grant would enable the archive to make this material accessible online through our website, YouTube channel and other social media outlets.

Archives & Special Collections at the Dean B. Ellis Library, Arkansas State University proposes to digitize the collection of KAIT-8 TV’s 16mm color newsfilm with sound. This twelve month project will digitize film reels to create high-­quality digital surrogates of this analog collection which was created by KAIT-8 between 1973 and 1980. The project will result in item level metadata, finding aids, and digital access copies of these records which will be posted on our portal hosted by Preservica. This moving image collection is the only one of its kind for Northeast Arkansas and Southeast Missouri. Although the content of these reels seems to focus on localism, it will substantially enrich the scholarly narratives of the late stages of the Civil Rights movement, the worldwide energy crisis, the marginalization and impoverishment of rural America, and the activity of local politicians' in national political affairs on behalf of fellow Arkansans.

As part of an ongoing multi-year preservation and access initiative to process the Franklin Furnace video collection in its entirety, Franklin Furnace (FF) requests funding to digitize its “at-risk” VHS tapes. The tapes to be processed are the only records of unique performance art works presented by the organization from the 1990’s forward. To date, a total of 77 viewing hours have been digitized. Rescued FF footage can be viewed by the general public on Vimeo, by the academic community on Artstor, and by on-site researchers in the offices of FF. The proposed project will utilize an existing workflow in which each tape is viewed and described by FF staffthen shipped to an outside vendor for cleaning, repair, and digitization. Upon return, the digitized files will be viewed for accuracy before being entered into an on-site central repository, backed up, and disseminated online.

University of Washington Libraries Special Collections (UWLSC) proposes a 12-month project to reformat and digitize 221 quarter-inch open-reel tapes of Seattle Lesbian Feminist Broadcasts (SLFB) which aired on the local community radio station KRAB-FM between 1967 and 1982. Programs covered diverse racial, religious, cultural, and ideological topics, such as Lesbian Mexicana, classism, ageism, Native American issues, Women in Old China, women's health, romance, animal oppression, and matriarchy, as well as documented events like women's festivals and Seattle's first Gay Pride Week in 1974. The project will result in 95% of the collection’s audio recordings made publicly available for free; most will be accessible online for streaming in CONTENTdm; others will be available on site. A project "splash" web-page will be created. Preservation files will be kept in perpetuity by UW. Metadata will be added to the finding aid (CC0) which will be updated.

The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) proposes an eleven-month project to outsource the digitization of 1,152 dictabelts in the Rod Serling collection and fund a temporary position at the WCFTR to do quality control inspection, ingest the files into the LTO system, and enhance the existing catalog records for the dictabelts and online finding aid for the collection. An award winning writer and producer best known for his television series The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) and Night Gallery (1970-1973) Serling also wrote scripts for made for-TV-movies, theatrically released films, stage productions and short stories for publications. The dictabelts document Serling’s work in all of these areas as well as correspondence written and speeches given between 1965-1969. The digitized recordings will be available to the public for multidisciplinary research and study. Patrons will be able to listen to them on-site at the WCFTR.

Blank Forms proposes to digitize the audio and video archive of pioneering sound artist and experimental composer Maryanne Amacher (1938–2009). Throughout her career, Amacher’s work proved incompatible with the disciplinary and institutional frameworks of her day. A large portion of her work was never commercially released, and access to her performances and installations was limited even in her time. Today, the scarcity of materials and recordings available to the public is unable to embody Amacher’s long, important history of production. Blank Forms will partner with NYU Fales Library & Special Collections to house the digital archive, and will present a number of programs that engage and expand upon the newly digitized materials. Our goal is to keep this seminal work in the minds of students, musicians, and artists, and to make a digital collection that, like Amacher’s work, is uniquely representative of the conceptual challenges of preserving time-based media.

This project will digitize 144 open reel-to-reel, magnet tapes and 52 motion picture films from speeches, conferences, films and other programs which included public figures who spoke out to end the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s. The metadata records in the Peace Collection, for these recordings will be extended to meet current standards. These recordings, which are unique, will be made available to the general public, via the Internet Archives and the Peace Collection web site. The voices and images of Vietnam Veterans, anti-war activists, business leaders, religious leaders, civil rights leaders, women peace activists, entertainers, U.S. public policy figures, and Vietnamese activists, will be made available for the first time, richly adding to our understanding of the history of the U.S. in the middle of the twentieth century, to peace history, and the workings of social justice movements.

The Oklahoma Historical Society {OHS) plans to digitize and make available <5000> Audio files including: 1/4" magnetic reel tape; audio/mpeg; cassette Tape; CO-ROMs from the Living Legends Collection. The interviews selected will reflect the state's political, cultural, and economic history, span Oklahoma regionally and cover the mid nineteenth to the early twentieth century time period. The OHS believes that this undertaking vAll successfully contribute to the public's access to these regionally significant interviews.

Columbia University will preserve and provide access to over a decade’s worth of audiotapes from the archive of groundbreaking broadcaster Bob Fass. A pioneer of “free form” radio for seven decades, Fass is best known for his late-night program Radio Unnameable. During the sixties it featured unscripted appearances by poets and musicians like Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan, and social activists like Abbie Hoffman and Timothy Leary – a forum where listeners could interact with their idols and one another. In 1968 alone, Fass broadcast live events like the “Yip In” at Grand Central Station, Columbia University student protests, and the Chicago Democratic National convention. Once digitized, these recordings will be a major resource to study mobilization of dissent via mass-media in late-twentieth century America. As Professor Brent Edwards’ letter indicates, the archive offers “an unparalleled window into the full gamut of American counterculture from the 1960s through the millennium.”

Our goal is to digitize, index, and make accessible six archival collections from the Arkansas/Oklahoma River Valley that document the voices of the minority groups that have helped shaped this frontier/border region of the United States. These other voices of the frontier are found in the Jack E. Hill Collection, the Judy Blevins Collections, The Lincoln Echo, the Dr. Harry McDonald Collection, the Southeast Asian Refugees at Fort Chaffee Collections, and the Bobby and Jerry Turner Collection. These collections represent African-American, Laotian, Hmong, Native American, and Vietnamese voices, which will help illuminate and enhance our collective understanding of US frontier history. Specifically, we seek to create open access digital copies of these repositories with a searchable index. This archive will function as a sampling of these border voices, helping scholars reconceive the predominantly white history of the frontier.

This 18-month project is an internal collaboration between the NOAA Central Library and the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). Both hold original source material for use by scientists and patrons conducting environmental research. The significant holdings of African weather and climate data were acquired through NOAA’s participation in the World Data System. The records were sent from foreign governments and African colonies for preservation and inclusion into the global climate record. The project includes shipping, scanning, quality control and hosting of the resulting digital files on the NOAA Library site, as well as permanent archival in NCEI’s digital archive.

The two-year project would result in the digitization of specific portions of the biodiversity heritage literature that currently exist in hard copy only in the University of Nebraska State Museum (UNSM), a Smithsonian-affiliated institution. The digitized field notebooks, taxon notebooks, U.S. government documents, and University of Nebraska Studies from the Zoological Laboratory series will be openly available for free with no registration required in the highly-ranked University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) Digital Commons institutional repository (IR). Faculty, staff, and students within the UNL University Libraries will conduct the work of digitizing and uploading the documents, and creating the associated metadata. The resulting collection of accessible literature will enable greater cross-linking with existing specimen datasets. The literature will be available to scholars, students, and the lay public to read and re-use for free in perpetuity, and will facilitate enhanced cross-linking of databases.

The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum seeks support over 24 months for Phase 1 of the Hatch Show Print Preservation and Access project. This project will conserve, digitize, and provide public access to 10,000 rare, historically significant, and fragile works on paper in the Museum’s permanent collection. The Hatch Show Print collection is composed of posters, prints, documents, proofs, and tracings that chronicle 137 years of American culture through promotional and advertising poster design and printing. The project will make historical show posters available and accessible to the general public and to scholars of American history, advertising, and many other disciplines. It will also make artifacts readily searchable and available for exhibitions and educational programs at the Museum and through content partners like Vanderbilt University.

WHYY seeks support to digitize and create free access to its 28-year collection of the award-winning public radio program Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane. Produced and owned totally by WHYY, this engaging and thought-provoking daily interview program examines regional, national, and international news, explores new ideas and trends, and introduces listeners to fascinating people including Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, playwrights, and poets; city, state and national legislators; government officials; actors; musicians; scientists; historians; and corporate leaders. Audio recordings from the program spanning 1988 to 2012 need to be digitized. This grant will support the digitization of the most at-risk audio recordings of the collection- 6,276 recoded hours on digital audio tape (DAT) files and 205 recorded hours on reels. The grant will also support basic metadata creation and the creation of a rich metadata application profile and template. WHYY will open access to the collection via WorldCat and Pennsylvania DPLA.

The goal of this project is to provide access to currently inaccessible and decaying videotapes made by a pioneering video organization that produced some of the earliest community-made documentary television in the United States. Over an 18-month project, Visual Studies Workshop (VSW) will transfer 720 videotapes from the Portable Channel (PC) collection to digital files, and create associated technical and descriptive metadata. Once digitized, the videos and descriptive metadata will be shared online on The College at Brockport SUNY’s Digital Commons. The digitized video and metadata will also be accessible onsite at VSW and copies of master digital files will be distributed to selected academic libraries with complementary collections.

Northern Michigan University proposes a one-year project to digitize the the John D. Voelker papers (MSS-39) maintained by the Central Upper Peninsula and Northern Michigan University Archives. The project will contract with CreeksideDigital to digitize approximately 106 cubic feet of paper, photographic, and analog audio-visual material. The project will link digital objects with appropriate metadata to the collection’s existing EAD finding aid on ArchivesSpace. Working with NMU faculty and students, the Project will collaborate with the NMU Department of English’s Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate Program as an instructional resource and to create enhanced scholarly content to the digital records. Finally, the Project will utilize Preservica as the long-term preservation and access software platform for the digital records.