Hidden Collections Registry - Dev

The History Department, the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH), and University Archives & Special Collections at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) propose to collaborate with the Genoa U.S. Indian School Foundation and National Archives branches in Kansas City and Denver to digitize, describe, and make accessible materials related to the Genoa U.S. Indian Industrial School, one of the largest U.S. Indian boarding schools, which was in operation from 1884 to 1934. We will process approximately 10500 pages (or 3368 items) of student case files, admittance forms, correspondence, censuses, administrative and health reports, photographs, artwork, ephemera, artifacts, and a student newspaper held by the National Archives and by the Genoa U.S. Indian School Foundation. Our project will make these hidden records accessible to the families of Indian people who attended the school, researchers who study the Indian boarding schools, and the general public.

The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Penn Museum) proposes to digitize folkloric sound recordings created by some of the best-known American folklorists, who worked at the University of Pennsylvania’s Folklore Department in the years 1962-2006. These field recordings document songs and stories common to people in the early and mid-20th century. For the purposes of this application we are proposing the transfer of the recordings clustered in the Caribbean: Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, St. Vincent’s, and Nevis. The recordings are a singular record of folklore and culture in our hemisphere, and are very well documented with text and photographic records. This will make it possible to eventually digitally unite (across media) a body of research of great value to current and future students of folklore, Africana scholars, and many other researchers and music enthusiasts, as well as to people from the places documented.

In 1976, Don Bolles, an investigative journalist for The Arizona Republic, died after a bomb exploded beneath his car in central Phoenix. Many, including Bolles himself, believe that organized criminals were behind the hit. Bolles’s murder has become an infamous mark in Arizona history—a watershed moment which spurred law officers, politicians and the courts into reform. On a national scale, its notoriety called attention to the dangers of Investigative Journalism and reinforced its viability. Forty years later, the bombing is still shrouded in mystery and controversy. The Arizona State Archives is requesting funding to digitize a small portion of tapes from the Bolles Collection that we believe contain valuable information such as police interviews and wiretaps of the case’s most important figures. Their digitization will expand access and provide new information about the criminal activity that spanned many levels of Arizona society during the late twentieth century.

The goal of this project is to digitize and make available all of UM’s recorded holdings. Much of the content exists on reel-to-reel, cassettes, or VHS. These formats are not ideal for research purposes, and the tape quality is degrading. Among the collection is a 1967 recording of a campus concert featuring Spanish composer Luis Benejam’s music, the last performed during his lifetime. Other recordings include interviews with Caldecott Medal winners, radio speeches/talks/lectures given by the station owner from his world travels that were broadcast to central Alabama in the 1950s and 1960s, radio commercial reels featuring local business ads, and the entire collection of VHS recordings of campus lectures, skits, etc. Digitizing UM’s complete holdings enables us to place content online for researchers, the community, and alumni. Interest is especially high as 2017-2019 marks the bicentennial celebrations of both the City of Montevallo and the State of Alabama.

The Kent/Blossom Music Festival (https://www.kent.edu/blossom) is an advanced institute for professional music training operated by Kent State University in conjunction with The Cleveland Orchestra and Blossom Music Center in Northeast Ohio. It offers public performances by distinguished artist faculty and talented musicians from around the world. The program began in 1968, and has acted as a launchpad for many professional musicians, including current members of dozens of well renowned orchestras and noted chamber groups. This proposal focuses on audio recordings of festival performances, addressing specifically the undigitized portion of the remaining reel to reel audio with Sticky Shed Syndrome and unformatted DAT tapes. The project will preserve an important piece of history and also address a serious, known preservation issue within the reel to reel audio recordings. Further, ideas will be outlined in this proposal to increase access and discoverability of the festival recordings.

Lawrence Lipton’s L.A. in the Time of the Beats will reveal many previously unheard interviews and musical performances from the Beat generation and later countercultural movements. For this pilot project, we will digitize 300 hours of original 7" reel-to-reel audio recordings of writer Lawrence Lipton’s 1950s and 1960s interviews with monumental artists like James Baldwin, John Cage, and Langston Hughes; live readings by numerous Beat poets from the "Venice West" scene; and live jazz and poetry experiments with musicians like Dave Brubeck and Buddy Collette. Many of these recordings were made for Lipton’s landmark study of the Beats, The Holy Barbarians (1959), and his study of sexual mores, The Erotic Revolution (1965). We will digitize and catalog 300 hours of these recordings for free online public access via the USC Digital Library and Digital Public Library of America. We will preserve the archival BWF files in the USC Digital Repository.

The BSO Archives Department seeks a $41,923 grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources to digitize 310 DATs that correspond to 292 Tanglewood Festival concerts held at the Koussevitzky Music Shed between the years 1992 and 2002. DATs are a high-risk medium and these particular tapes contain the organization’s only audio recordings of concerts taking place in the Koussevitzky Music Shed during that time period. CLIR funding will ensure that the BSO completes the necessary transfer process in a timely manner so that no significant data losses occur and all concert recordings are preserved and made available to the public. Materials produced as part of the project will include WAV, MP3, and CD copies of recordings for archival storage, onsite public use, and individually approved remote access.

Our goal is to preserve and improve access to 281 original audiocassette recordings of historic artists’ lectures given at SAIC: 83 recordings of Stan Brakhage’s classroom lectures (1970 - 1976) and 198 recordings of artists’ lectures from the Visiting Artists Program (VAP) (1984-1996). These rare audio artifacts reveal a deep cross section of artistic thought and practice among some of the most significant artists of the late 20th century. Age and format obsolescence require that the tapes are digitized for preservation and continued use. We will digitize all 281 tapes, creating preservation masters and access files, and updating metadata currently shared in our library catalogs. In keeping with our Core Values as educators, we are committed to making these original recordings as broadly available as possible for teaching, research and inspiration.

Opened in 1975, the Rice University Shepherd School of Music has become one of the most prominent music schools in the country. Faculty and alumni include Pulitzer Prize and Grammy winners, and musicians who have performed at Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Opera, and other world class performing venues. Thousands of performances by Rice faculty and students have been recorded and collected in multiple formats, with accompanying programs and other documentation. Many of these recordings --- particularly those made on reel-to-reel tape---are on the verge of being lost to media deterioration or technology obsolescence. Our primary goal is to convert these recordings to digital format through the NEDCC. We will preserve these newly digitized audio files through existing digital library preservation strategies and create descriptive metadata for them, ultimately making access versions of these performances available online at the university’s institutional repository so that the public may freely listen to them.

The Roulette Archive Restoration Project supports the preservation, restoration, digitization, and accessibility of thousands of recordings on threatened media of historic avant-garde and experimental music concerts presented at Roulette Intermedium's New York venues since 1978. The project includes analysis and reconciliation of contents, condition assessment, legal and contract research, restoration procedures, digitization, and exploration of viability and benefits of moving the physical and digital contents to New York University's Fales Library and Special Collections, which is consulting on the project. This first phase will focus on 200 analog reel-to-reel tapes made in the 1980s; media in particular jeopardy and requiring special handling. The project also prepares the materials and permissions to insure access to scholars, artists, and the public. Subsequent phases of the project will address PCM-Digital recordings, DAT tapes, native digital, and video formats. There are nearly 4,000 total recordings in the collection.

Ohio University Libraries proposes a 6-month project to effect the digital reformatting of 344 cassette tapes containing 702 author interviews conducted by radio personality Don Swaim. Swaim used these recordings to cut his nationally-syndicated Book Beat program, which aired throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. The Libraries have already undertaken the digitization and full transcription of the edited broadcasts and seek to do the same for the source material. Following digitization, access copies will be ingested into already-prepared metadata records in the Libraries’ CONTENTdm instance and masters will be backed up in MetaArchive. Swaim has transferred his copyrights to the Libraries and previously supported a project to provide low-quality streaming copies of the interviews through the extremely popular domain wiredforbooks.org. Together with planned transcription, this multi-faceted access plan emphasizing accessibility, interoperability, enhanced indexing, and digital preservation will ensure the greatest possible continuing impact for this invaluable assemblage of voices.

Special Collections & Archives, Wake Forest University, and repository of the North Carolina Historical Baptist Collection will reformat and digitize approximately 1,500 at-risk and rare open-reel audio recordings belonging to the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina. The open-reel tapes document the American evangelical movement and contain presentations by prominent Southern Baptist pastors and church representatives at a number of evangelical conferences and annual meetings of the Convention. The speakers and programs on the tapes document the denomination’s activities and subjects of discussion, 1957-1980, ranging from Baptist theology to broad cultural and societal issues. This project will result in the long-term preservation digital storage for these tapes, and broad access through the Wake Forest University North Carolina Baptist History Portal currently being developed. Once completed, there will be an active outreach program, focused on demonstrating how historians, researchers, and religious scholars can use these records in their research and teaching.