Hidden Collections Registry - Dev

Items

• Preserving the Voices of the Don Bolles Bombing Investigation

  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.

• Digitizing the Sights and Sounds of the University of Montevallo: A Media Archive

  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.

• Preserving Institutional History; Kent/Blossom Music Festival

  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.

• Preservation reformatting of endangered recordings of BSO and Boston Pops concerts held at Tanglewood’s Koussevitzy Music Shed, 1992-2002, from DAT to WAV, MP3, and CD formats.

  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.

• Preserving Historic SAIC Lectures: Stan Brakhage (1970-1976), and The Visiting Artists Program (1984-1996)

  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.

• Preserving our musical culture before it fades away.

  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.

• Roulette Audio Archive Restoration Project (Phase 1)

  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.

• Don Swaim Book Beat Interviews, 1973-1993

  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.

• Lowell Thomas Audio Digitization Project: Reel to Reel Recordings of Newscasts and Interviews

  The goal of the Lowell Thomas Audio Digitization Project is to digitize 174 reel to reel audiotapes in the Lowell Thomas Papers that have been identified as being at risk due to their advanced deterioration and historic significance. The digitization process will preserve the content of the audiotapes and make the content of the tapes more accessible to researchers. Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) will act as the vendor for the project. Lowell Thomas was one of America’s most popular news men from the 1930s through the 1970s. He delivered the news to millions of listeners every evening for forty-six years and became a household name. His news broadcasts document a significant range of 20th century history across the U.S. and the world. However, due to the obsolete format on which the recordings are housed, it is difficult for researchers to gain access to them.

• Recordings of the Notre Dame Sophomore Literary Festival (1968, 1971, 1972, and 1979): Featuring Tom Stoppard, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, John Barth, and Others

  The Notre Dame Sophomore Literary Festival (SLF) brought to campus luminaries in poetry, prose, drama, and criticism, particularly in the event’s early years in the 1960s and ’70s. This project will digitize and transcribe approximately 55 hours of SLF readings and lectures from 1968, 1971, 1972, and 1979; speakers include Tom Stoppard, Allen Ginsberg, and John Barth, among other eminent writers. On open reel ¼” tapes, the unique value of these recordings to literary scholars of this period—for whom spoken word is an essential supplement to printed text—is at great risk of loss due to deterioration and obsolescence. The significance of these recordings is complemented by the University Archives’ Raymond M. Funk, Jr. Papers, which feature correspondence with and photos of the SLF participants. After digitization by the NEDCC, these recordings will be transcribed and publicized in online finding aids, and representative clips will be made available for online listening.

• Preserving the Early Live Sound Recordings of Texas Music Icon, Jerry Jeff Walker

  The Wittliff Collections, partnering with the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC), will create and preserve digital surrogates of thirty-two ¼-inch open reel audio tapes from the archive of performer, Jerry Jeff Walker. The at-risk tapes contain approximately 25 hours of live and studio recordings dating 1966-1981, and are currently housed in original containers acquired directly from Mr. Walker. Born in New York, Jerry Jeff Walker began his career in the Greenwich Village folk scene. He later settled in Austin and became a driving force behind the progressive country movement of the early 1970s, along with Willie Nelson, Guy Clark, and others. The tapes selected for this project span Walker’s early career and include live recordings from coffee shops in New York as well as original recordings from Luckenbach, Houston, and Austin, Texas. Many of these tapes have not been played since they were originally recorded.

• The Catskill Regional Folklife and History Archive

  The Catskill Regional Folklife and History Archive consists of audio and visual media, including 240 cassette tapes containing oral history interviews with Catskill natives. The tapes have been stored in filing cabinets for decades, and we hope to digitally archive and make this content available online.

• Digitization, Archiving and Access; 90 years of Film and Video History at the National Cathedral

  Since its original vision by Major L’Enfant as “a great church for national purposes,” granted a charter by Congress in 1893, and its foundation laid in 1907 attended by President Theodore Roosevelt, the Washington National Cathedral has been a place of prayer, reflection, and solace for generations of Americans. This is where history has been made, serving both the revered and everyday individual with its awe-inspiring architecture, prayerful events, stimulating lectures, and extraordinary musical performances. These events have been captured by Cathedral staff for over 90 years on more than a thousand film reels and videotapes starting in the 1930’s. This proposal requests funding to assess and digitize a selected portion of this collection (218 tapes) and to create a long-term plan for preservation and access for the entire collection (>1,000 items). The project will create and outreach plan provide access to scholars, educators, and the public to this collection.

• Digitization of 16” Electrical Transcription Discs of the National Music Camp 1938-1955

  Interlochen Center for the Arts (formerly the National Music Camp) holds a collection of approximately 1,000 broadcast transcription discs of music concerts performed at the Interlochen Bowl by the National High School Orchestra, Band and prominent visiting musicians. The discs date from 1938 to 1955 and contain approximately 500 hours of content. These fragile discs are at-risk and in need of being transferred to the digital domain. Interlochen Public Radio (IPR) will out-source the discs to be digitized by a third party, including the input of any available metadata. Digital copies will be in a high-resolution preservation copy and a low-resolution access copy. Once digitized, the program material will be integrated by IPR into original programming content for broad distribution via traditional broadcast, podcast, and online streaming, while respecting copyright. The audio material will also be made available on campus to researchers and/or alumni who participated in the concerts.

• Georgetown University Forum: Preserving Historical Radio

  Georgetown University Library proposes to preserve and make available over 600 hours (1,207 open-reel tapes) of public affairs radio programming from 1946-1972. These historic recordings are from the long-running Georgetown University Forum radio program. Program topics such as “European Refugees and Peace,” “Pre-Paid Health Care,” and “The Bill of Rights and Congressional Investigations” are as timely today as they were when originally broadcast. The content of these programs is currently inaccessible due to obsolescence of its analog format and potential for damage, making these unique and powerful recordings at risk of being lost forever. When reformatted and made available, students and scholars will be able to consider today’s issues in a broader historical context, and learn more about student engagement and attitudes over the decades. The entire collection has been arranged and described by archival staff; metadata has been created and will be enhanced for greater discoverability.

• Chicago Public Media - Digital Archive Project

  Chicago Public Media (CPM) has nearly 20,000 audio recordings documenting over 25 years of the Chicago region’s history. These recordings include interviews with former elected officials, music and cultural events, original programming created by WBEZ and other significant historical emblems of our region's past. From the political machinery of Richard Daley to the ascent of Barack Obama, from the founding of the electric blues to the birth of American sketch comedy, CPM has captured pieces of history and stored them as physical archives. This project is a three-year effort to preserve and publish audio recordings. The end result of this initiative will be a thriving home for a wealth of historical, informational and cultural content. Evaluation of impact will be conducted using highly reliable metrics and by soliciting regular user feedback. CPM will monitor the number of institutions that present our archival site as a resource to constituents.

• Digitization of The Catholic Hour Television Show Collection.

  The University of Dayton Libraries proposes the digitization of 840 episodes of The Catholic Hour television talk show. The Catholic Hour was produced by the Archdiocese of Denver from December 1984 to July 2003. Each hour-long episode featured several stories, on topics ranging from priests’ lives, to refugee camps in Africa, to Catholic education in Denver, and more. The show also featured content showcasing speakers of national and international importance, such as Mother Angelica, Mother Teresa, and Pope John Paul II. The eleven-month project will require the digitization of 840 U-matic tapes, with the UD Libraries receiving the converted files (both master and web-accessible) on external storage media. The master files will also be copied onto LTO-7 tapes for additional security. A portion of the digitized content will be made available on the Libraries’ online digital repository, and the rest will be accessible on-site.

• A Digital Archive of Massachusetts Women’s Rights Petitions

  The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (RIAS) and its Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, along with associated faculty in History, Government, American Studies and African and African-American Studies, and in collaboration with the Massachusetts State Archives and the Harvard College Library, will conduct a two-year project to (1) catalog and digitize women’s rights petitions sent to the Massachusetts state legislature from 1619 to 1925 (estimated number between 2,500 and 2,800); (2) conduct collaborative research on these petitions in the fields of women’s history, literature, and American legal and political history; and (3) join the records with data on anti-slavery and Native American petitions sent to the Massachusetts state legislature assembled from previous grants as part of an open-access website where the petition images and data can be used by teachers, researchers, citizens, genealogists, and the public at large for further research.

• The WGBH Health Care Digitization Project

  The WGBH Health Care Digitization Project (the “Project”) will digitize, preserve and make accessible program materials from The AIDS Quarterly and The Health Quarterly series via WGBH’s American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) and Open Vault websites. Both series were magazine-style documentaries broadcast on public television between 1988-1993. The AIDS Quarterly (six programs) covered the AIDS epidemic in depth; The Health Quarterly (eight programs) reported more broadly on US healthcare. The collection also includes health-related materials produced by WGBH for the series NOVA, the standalone documentary AIDS Research: The Story So Far, and related stories from WGBH’s Ten O’Clock News.  Materials from all series exist on obsolete videotape formats including ¾”,  1”, Betacam and film.  The collection contains rich source material including interviews with doctors, patients, policy experts, activists, academics, government officials and congressional representatives. WGBH will create transcripts of all materials containing speech when transcripts do not already exist.

• Digitizing 150 Years of San Francisco Art Institute Exhibitions History

  The San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI)’s project will digitize and make widely available online its extensive Exhibitions and Public Programs Archival Collections—which include a vast store of unique primary source materials—and audio and video recordings of decades of public programs. The collections represent a critical primary source for the emergence of modern and contemporary art history and provide a rich resource for scholars in a range of disciplines, from art and art history to politics, literature, architecture, history, geography, and many others. Digitization is an essential component of our larger goal of making these important collections easily found and accessible for a broad range of researchers—both scholarly and casual—throughout the world. We will make them available on the SFAI website and through the online archives platform CollectiveAccess. We request funding for the 24-month second phase of the project, launched in 2016 with initial funding from the IMLS.

• Oversized and Underexposed: A Collaboration between La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club and Metropolitan New York Library Council to Digitize and Expand Access to a Hidden Record of New York City’s Off-Off-Broadway Movement

  “Oversized and Underexposed” is a collaboration between the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) and the Archives of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. It is designed to expand access to La MaMa’s unique collections of oversized posters and photographs and to pilot an affordable digitization service model for the New York Metropolitan region. This 18 month collaborative project has three principle goals. First, to digitize and expand access to a unique collection of materials documenting the history of New York City’s Off-Off-Broadway movement; Second, to pilot and launch METRO’s large format digitization services, which will offer access to an affordable set of tools and workflows for METRO’s community of more than 250 collecting organizations; Third, to offer a series of public programs and events exploring the history and graphic styles of La MaMa’s posters and photographs in the context of our current social and political climate.

• Fly on the Wall: Black Natchez by Ed Pincus and David Neuman, Film Digitization for Access, 1965 and 1967

  The Amistad Research Center seeks to digitize the raw outtake film footage for the civil-rights-era documentary film, Black Natchez (1967) and the unfinished sequel film. The film, produced by filmmakers Ed Pincus and David Neuman, charts early attempts to organize and register Black voters and the formation of the self-defense group Deacons for Defense and Justice in Natchez, Mississippi in 1965. The filmmakers returned to Natchez in 1967 following the murder of Wharlest Jackson, the treasurer of the Natchez branch of the NAACP, to document Jackson’s funeral and the aftermath of his murder. Footage is shot cinéma vérité style, with the filmmakers acting as “fly-on-the-wall” observers to the action. This project will digitize and provide access to approximately ninety hours of rare black and white 16mm footage of the African American community in Natchez at the height of violence, racial tensions, and the fight for civil rights during the 1960s.

• The University of Chicago Digital Middle East

  The University of Chicago Library proposes a 2-year project to digitize a collection of 1,175 monograph and serial titles from our Microform Projects in Ottoman, Persian, and Arabic. This collection offers a rich resource for scholars in a broad range of academic disciplines, including social, intellectual, and political history, literature, religion, and philosophy, relating to the Arab World, Iran, North Africa, and the areas included within the former Ottoman Empire. Materials date from 1734–1997, though the bulk are fragile materials from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The project will utilize the existing preservation-quality microform surrogates to create an efficient and cost-effective digitization workflow and will consult with a Faculty Advisory Group to ensure we meet scholarly needs. Digitization and cataloging will be done by vendors, local staff will process the resulting files. The digital files will be made available through records in OCLC, the Library’s catalog, and HathiTrust.

• Bringing Vaudeville into the Limelight: A Digital Representation of the Vaudeville Era from Institutions Coast to Coast

  Over the course of 30 months, this joint initiative between Emerson College, Marshall University, University of Iowa, and University of Washington will digitize and make accessible our institutions unique and complementary vaudeville collections. We will create a digital representation of vaudeville materials in select academic institutions throughout the United States. Content will be hosted locally through our respective institutions’ digital repositories and presented/contextualized through an aggregated online portal. From the initial registration of an act with popular vaudeville registries, to the advertisement/payment of a performer, to ephemera collected to add to the historical record of vaudeville in America, our proposed collaboration will track the life cycle of vaudeville and offers the modern scholar an unprecedented level of access to vaudeville materials from disparate geographic locations.

• Rescuing Optical Astronomy Data (ROAD): Save the Bits

  This project proposes to migrate a valuable collection of optical astronomy data currently stored on obsolete magnetic tapes into a new online repository called Astrolabe, where it will be widely accessible for further research, follow-up to new scientific observations, and linking to corresponding scholarly publications through emerging paradigms for open data and open science. Since the equipment needed to read these tapes is becoming obsolete, and since the tapes themselves are not being curated for long-term preservation, the data are in danger of being lost forever. As a long-lived scholarly institution serving the United States astronomy community, American Astronomical Society (AAS) is committed to providing astronomers with innovative services in a spirit of openness and collaboration. AAS will oversee the effort to rescue this collection of data in support of the needs of the community, and to further contribute to development of the Astrolabe system for astronomical research.