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The following projects have been funded through the Recordings at Risk grant program, a national regranting program administered by CLIR to support the preservation of rare and unique audio and audiovisual content of high scholarly value. Generously funded by the Mellon Foundation, the program will award a total of $6.75 million between 2017 and 2025. The Eleventh Call was the most recent award cycle under current funding. Sign up to receive updates about future funding opportunities and awards.
The American Craft Council (ACC), an independent arts non-profit, will digitize 275 audio recordings, video recordings, and films related to American craft and craft artists from the audiovisual collection of the American Craft Council Library & Archives, dated between 1959 and 2006. The audiovisual materials in the collection include interviews and panel discussions with major craft artists, craft artist demonstrations, conference and symposia proceedings, and visual recordings produced in conjunction with exhibitions from the Museum of Contemporary Crafts/American Craft Museum. Many of the materials are fragile and susceptible to decay, in formats such as 16mm film and magnetic tape. Additionally, these materials are largely inaccessible to researchers due to the lack of playback equipment in the ACC library for these outdated formats. The ACC requests funding to digitally preserve our audiovisual collection to protect valuable content from being lost, and to enhance access to the content by library users.
This project will digitize and make available online 197 reels of 16mm and 8mm film that are part of the B’nai B’rith International Archives. Founded in 1843, B’nai B’rith is one of the world’s largest Jewish human rights, philanthropic, and community service organizations. At 345 linear feet, the B’nai B’rith collection is not only one of the largest collections at the AJA, but it is also one of the most accessed by researchers. The films have been largely inaccessible due to their fragility and the difficulty of playing the 16mm films that have separate sound and video reels. This project will involve cleaning and digitizing the reels, editing the sound and video and provide sync dailies—when applicable—together, adding metadata and closed captioning, and finally linking the films to the AJA’s website for public use.
The Amherst Center for Russian Culture (ACRC) proposes to digitize 168 video tapes and 1,246 audio cassette tapes of interviews, lectures, performances, and rehearsals recorded in the USSR by the American theater scholar Alma Law between 1974 and 1997. This collection offers a unique history of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s innovative theater and its legacy in the late Soviet and post-Soviet eras. Meyerhold was a revolutionary director whose nonrealistic theatrical approach greatly influenced twentieth-century experimental theater both in and out of Russia. After his arrest and secret execution in 1940, it became dangerous to keep his records, or even talk about him. Law’s interviews with Meyerhold’s artistic collaborators thus paint a collective portrait of the understudied and influential director. We propose to digitize the video and audio cassettes, create and publish descriptions, and provide access to this rich collection, making it available to scholars and students for the first time.
Austin Film Festival (AFF) intends to digitize 104 at-risk, Mini-DV tapes of interview and event recordings from 2003-2010 that feature culturally impactful film and television artists. AFF has been an advocate for recording and preserving the conversations between interviewees, panelists, and the audience since its inaugural year in 1994. In 2009, AFF’s co-founder and Executive Director, Barbara Morgan, realized this vast inventory of recordings was in danger of deteriorating, prompting the quest to both preserve and share this material. The organization sought to collaborate with Texas State University and has housed the AFF On Story Archive at the Wittliff Collections of the Alkek Library at the University for 15 years and counting. Materials in the archive include educational interviews, live panels, Q&As, script readings, and other events that offer insight into writers/filmmakers’ craft, personal influences, historical contexts, and bodies of work at large.
This project will encompass the digitization of 204 reel-to-reel audio tapes and 1,328 cassette tapes of audio recordings of meetings of the Chicago City Council for the years 1970 to 2010. These unique recordings are a matter of public record and will finally be digitally preserved according to the National Digital Stewardship Alliance’s guidelines and made available via the Chicago City Clerk’s web site and the Internet Archive. The tapes span 40 years of Chicago mayoral administrations and contain primary source evidence of major events of Chicago’s history, from Richard J. Daley’s reign as one of the most powerful mayors in American history to Harold Washington’s historic win as Chicago’s first African American mayor in 1983 and the subsequent Council Wars that followed the election. This will be a major resource for the study of four decades of Chicago’s municipal history as well as American history.
Small Gauge, Big Shoulders: Digitizing Bill Stamets’ Super-8 Magnetic Sound Films of Public Life in Chicago
This project will digitize, catalog, and make publicly available approximately 70 hours of Super-8 sound film shot by Chicago photojournalist Bill Stamets between the late 1970s and early 2000s. Chronicling what Stamets describes as “a miscellany of civic occasions where Americans make sense of power,” this footage depicts a variety of important Chicago figures, including the groundbreaking mayorships of Harold Washington and Jane Byrne, as well as numerous heated protests, celebratory parades, and other culturally-revealing public events. This year-long project will result in 271 item-level catalog records and streaming films that will be shared online via Chicago Film Archives’ website.
The CUNY Dominican Studies Institute Library will work with Media Transfer Service to digitize 162 audio and video recordings from the Dominican bachata music collection donated by scholar Deborah Pacini Hernández. The collection includes first-hand field work interviews with marginalized musicians, unique musical performances that document the rich underground music scene in the Dominican Republic’s urban slums from 1986 to 1994, as well as documents of US-based bachata artists from 2003-2011. The purpose is to digitize, preserve, and make available an essential yet little known early history of the development of bachata before the genre became internationally known. Once digitized, all descriptive metadata will be available online, providing access to the recordings. The digitization of this collection is essential to guarantee preservation and long-term availability.
Built in the 1920s, Hammond Castle Museum is the former residence of John Hays Hammond Jr. (1888-1965), a renowned scientist, inventor, and collector who held over 500 patents in multiple fields, including pipe organ technology, sound amplification, and mixing equipment. Hammond commissioned the construction of an 8,400 pipe organ in the castle, and invited organists from around the world to play and have their pieces recorded using his patented recording equipment. As a result of these and other recordings found in the collection, we have 2,000+ vinyl and shellac records that are in critical need of restoration and digitization. Discs include unpublished recordings of famous organists such as Richard Elsasser and Joseph Bonnet as well as the possibility of recordings of John Hammond himself. This project will appeal to a broad and diverse audience–from the museum’s 60,000 visitors per season to classical music, sound technology, and history scholars.
Illinois State Archives, in partnership with Bel Air Sound Studio, will digitize 10 open-reel tapes and 340 cassette tapes from the Legislative Commission to Visit and Examine State Institutions. From 1959 to 1984 the Illinois General Assembly developed three subcommittees from the commission to perform visits and examine various State institutions. Visitations were made at state hospitals, children’s service centers, security hospitals, pediatric institutes, psychiatric institutes, zone or mental health centers, universities, prisons, juvenile correction facilities, the Illinois Soldiers and Sailors Home, the Illinois School for the Deaf, and the Illinois Braille and Sight Saving School. The digitization of these tapes will provide valuable information about the activities of the Commission, tours for the facilities, staffing and treatment of patients, insight on the closing of institutions, and investigations concerning patient treatment at these institutions.
Kenneth L. Hale (1934-2001) was a linguist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1967-1999. In addition to being an ardent student of endangered languages, Hale was actively involved in causes promoting the preservation of Indigenous languages and cultures. Hale’s collection at the MIT Libraries’ Department of Distinctive Collections includes 702 open-reel audio tapes, audio cassettes, and VHS tapes of more than 80 distinct languages and dialects from around the world, predominantly Indigenous languages of the Americas and Australian Aboriginal languages. This project seeks to digitize these recordings in order to enhance their description and enable their long-term preservation. Digitization will be conducted by Mass Productions in Tewksbury, MA. As the recordings are digitized, we will work with representatives from the featured language communities and experts in Indigenous collections and cultures to determine levels of description, access, and use for the recordings.
PEM’s Phillips Library requests funding to digitize 196 field recordings made by Martin Brunor between 1950 and 1982 while conducting research on the Austral Islands, the southernmost islands in French Polynesia. Today, the recordings are housed in the Phillips Library, one of the oldest libraries in the U.S., and are part of the Martin A. Brunor Papers. An American ethnologist, Brunor (1901–1983) studied the history, customs, and lives of the Indigenous peoples of the Austral Islands. He recorded research, diary entries, and oral histories with Indigenous peoples of Rurutu and other Austral Islands on magnetic and cassette tapes, and vinyl Audographs. Approximately 50% of the recordings’ contents are unknown; those that are identified document Indigenous knowledge, some now vanished. The collection is highly endangered as magnetic tapes are prone to degradation. This project will migrate and preserve the recordings—making them accessible to Austral Islanders and researchers.
The Purdue University Archives and Special Collections proposes digitizing 96 moving images and 39 audio recordings documenting the influential work and impact of Frank and Dr. Lillian Gilbreth. The Gilbreths ran an engineering consulting business in the early 20th century and became experts in the field of time and motion study. After Frank’s unexpected death, Lillian continued their research and business and became influential worldwide in the field of industrial engineering and home economics. These recordings contain previously unheard lectures, interviews, and instruction in the field of motion study and its applications in industrial engineering, the home, and the workplace. Scholars worldwide continue to study the Gilbreths pioneering, cross-disciplinary research, work, and impact on modern-day practices and technologies. The materials will be digitized through an external vendor, described online, and recordings will be freely accessible in our reading room and when possible, online.
Jun Kaneko is a visual artist known for his large-scale ceramic sculptures. Born 1942 in Japan, Kaneko came to Los Angeles in 1963 and studied under Peter Voulkos, Paul Soldner, and other influential artists of the California Clay Movement. Ree and Jun Kaneko co-founded the internationally renowned artist residency program Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska in 1985. This project will digitize 185 recordings from the Kanekos’ archives spanning from the 1950s to the early 2000s. They document Jun’s early life in Japan, exhibitions, special projects, experimental films, lectures, studio practice, and workshops with other artists including Voulkos. Many recordings document the formative years, resident artists, and community outreach activities of the Bemis Center. Due to condition and lack of playback equipment, these materials are not currently available for research. Digitization will allow the Foundation to preserve, identify, and describe these materials and make them available to researchers.
This digitization project will preserve and extend open access to 89 films produced by Baptista Films in the 1940’s-1950’s. Thirty-four of these films are unique to this collection, with only one additional known copy existing for the remaining 55, which are held at the Billy Graham Center Archive in Chicago. The collection comprises historic examples of early motion pictures produced for religious purposes. Categories include animation, films shot in foreign countries, musical performances by soloists and groups, testimonies by military personnel, scientifically oriented films, and films for children. The recordings will be cleaned, digitized, and prepared for storage following recommended practice and industry standards. Files of the recordings will be made freely accessible on Regent’s Alma Digital platform. A link to each film will also be added to the catalog records. Master digital files will be preserved in the Regent University Information Technology cloud storage.
The UCLA Library will digitize and preserve 119 1/4 inch audio tapes and 54 videotapes that document the history of the longest running Asian American theater group in the United States, Los Angeles-based East West Players (EWP), from 1965 to 1992. These audiovisual materials will be made accessible to both the community and researchers through free online access and on-site access at the UCLA Library, depending on the variable rights issues associated with the materials. As EWP prepares to celebrate its 60th anniversary in 2025, this project ensures that these heavily degraded tapes, which are the only existing documentation of EWP during this formative time period, are preserved before they are lost forever. Digitizing these materials not only provides reference and research materials to scholars in fields such as Asian American studies and theater, but also preserves the legacy of the founding members of EWP within their community.
This project aims to digitize 275 films in the Dr. Selma Fraiberg papers at the UCSF Archives and Special Collections (ASC). These films span a 15-year period during Dr. Fraiberg’s studies on the social, emotional, and physical development of sighted and visually impaired children. As a pioneer field of child psychoanalysis, Dr. Fraiberg used film as a key research tool, with these recordings forming the foundation of many of her influential books. Dr. Fraiberg’s work challenged conventional beliefs about disabled children, introduced therapeutic model of intervention for infants-mothers, and also influenced public policy discussions on their rights. However, access to her film collection, crucial to this research, remains limited due to its physical format and privacy concerns. This necessitates its digitization. This project aligns with UCSF’s commitment to preserving historical materials related to women in science and will ensure Dr. Fraiberg’s legacy continues to inspire future generations.
This project will migrate 705 audio-visual assets of events, programs, and speakers at Spelman College, the oldest existing historically Black college for women. The materials include audio cassettes, reel-to-reel, VHS, and Beta cam tapes of numerous campus events, including recordings of the internationally renowned Glee Club, Commencement, Founders Day activities, and lectures from esteemed campus guests such as Alice Walker, Stokely Carmichael, and Cicely Tyson. The digital files will be made accessible in the Spelman Archives reading room and online through Bynder, the College’s digital asset management system. The Archives staff will also collaborate with campus partners and external stakeholders for public programming and outreach for the collection. The availability of these previously inaccessible audio-visual materials is critical for continued research on Spelman, the overall history of one of the nation’s most revered historically Black collections, and its national and international impact academically, socially, and culturally.
The State Historical Society of Iowa will digitally preserve, catalog, promote and make publicly available 84 reels of 16mm film recordings that provide a unique snapshot in time into Iowa’s natural resources conservation history from the 1940s-1960s. These films were created for the Iowa Conservation Commission by the official photographer and visual documentarian for the commission, Jim Sherman, and his staff shortly after World War Two. For the next 20 years, the films were shared via over-the-air television broadcasts in Iowa and adjacent states, educating the public as to the operation and public works of the Conservation Commission. The production masters have been lost and these broadcast copies afflicted with severe vinegar syndrome are all that remain of this important historical legacy which we are requesting support to preserve. If not digitally preserved in the near future, the information they contain will be lost to history.
We will digitize and make publicly available approximately 240 hours of personal interviews with African American educators active in the eras of Jim Crow and desegregation, collected by local resident James Eddie McCoy between 1981 and 2016. McCoy captured a narrative that challenges much of the conventional understanding of school integration in America. Most of his informants have since died. Digitized materials will be deposited at the Thornton Library in Oxford and at the Shepard Library at North Carolina Central University (NCCU). They will be catalogued through the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center (DigitalNC.org) using metadata approved by the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). Hosted on DigitalNC servers, the recordings will become accessible globally through the DPLA catalog. A public program featuring Dr. Leslie Fenwick and Dr. Jarvis Givens will explore the historical importance of these recordings. This otherwise-lost or forgotten history will remain available both globally and locally.With the support of a Recordings at Risk grant, The Strong National Museum of Play will contract with a qualified external service provider to digitize and preserve 146 audio and video cassettes within the museum’s Anne D. Williams Collection—a rich variety of documentation on the history of jigsaw puzzles and the communities created around them in the 20th and 21st centuries. Digitization of these highly at-risk cassettes will preserve a set of unique and irreplaceable source material on the subject of play while serving an audience of scholars, researchers, and students across a variety of academic disciplines.
We will digitize and make publicly available approximately 240 hours of personal interviews with African American educators active in the eras of Jim Crow and desegregation, collected by local resident James Eddie McCoy between 1981 and 2016. McCoy captured a narrative that challenges much of the conventional understanding of school integration in America. Most of his informants have since died. Digitized materials will be deposited at the Thornton Library in Oxford and at the Shepard Library at North Carolina Central University (NCCU). They will be catalogued through the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center (DigitalNC.org) using metadata approved by the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). Hosted on DigitalNC servers, the recordings will become accessible globally through the DPLA catalog. A public program featuring Dr. Leslie Fenwick and Dr. Jarvis Givens will explore the historical importance of these recordings. This otherwise-lost or forgotten history will remain available both globally and locally.
Our objective is to preserve and provide access to a valuable collection of news reports from WMAR, the first television station in Maryland. The collection is located in the Special Collections and Archives department of the RLB Library at the University of Baltimore (a PBI) and contains unique footage of significant historical events, cultural and racial issues, and political and social changes in the region, particularly Baltimore. These recordings are currently stored on obsolete media, which are at risk of degradation. We will digitize 962 U-matic and VHS tapes from 1984 to 1993 and make them available through the Internet Archive website. This is the second phase of a larger project to digitize the entire collection. By digitizing the tapes, we will help preserve the coverage of historical events for both public and scholarly communities. The first phase successfully digitized 975 U-matic tapes from 1980 to 1985 in Cycle 8.
The University of Miami Libraries (UML) seeks to preserve 150 VHS, 15 compact cassettes and 160 microcassettes from the Janet Reno Papers. The recordings document trailblazing attorney and public official Reno’s career from the 1980s-2004, with the bulk from her time as U.S. Attorney General (1993-2001) and when she ran for Governor of Florida in 2002. Many of the recordings selected are unlikely to be found elsewhere. Scholars have expressed interest in the collection since its transfer to UML in 2017, but have been unable to access the audiovisual materials due to condition and format. Approximately 65% of these recordings have mold in 2024, an increase from approximately 60% when assessed in 2023. All are on magnetic media, making these recordings doubly at-risk. By digitizing these recordings, we will make them accessible for research and ensure the digital and physical materials are preserved for many years to come.
The UNMC McGoogan Health Sciences Library seeks $17,561.85 to digitize 65 film items from two collections within its archival holdings. These film reels contain rare footage of clinical practices, therapeutic interventions, and educational content used in mental health settings during the 20th century, giving researchers unparalleled insights into past treatment methodologies, patient experiences, and societal perceptions of mental illness. The proposed funding would support the digitization of these films, which due to their age, format, and condition are currently inaccessible to researchers. This project would also create publicly available, item-level descriptions and finding aids to assist with discovery. We will review each film for ethical content and privacy issues and apply solutions as needed. Snippets of some of these films have been made available by other institutions; however, by digitizing these reels, we can unlock their entire educational and historical significance, ensuring their preservation, wider dissemination, and research use.
The University of Pittsburgh Library System (ULS) proposes to preserve, digitize, and provide free public access to recordings of the WCAE’s “Let’s Tell a Story” radio program (1947-1954), held on 300 aluminum-cored transcription discs. Featuring librarian-storytellers Margaret Hodges, Bessie Hardie, and Kathryn Kohberger, these episodes were recorded in conjunction with Pittsburgh public schools and aired during school hours. The recordings, comprising primarily folk and fairytales, are the only copies known to exist. This material is significant to scholarship on children, media, marketing, education, storytelling, and culture: demonstrating the relationships between libraries, radio, and education in the post-war era; documenting the bridge from radio to television, from regional to syndicated; and capturing storytelling techniques particular to librarians and early radio technology. Through preservation, digitization, and robust metadata, this project will make these at-risk audio resources permanently and openly accessible to scholars, community researchers, students, and the public.
VCU Libraries seek funds for stabilization and digital reformatting of 156 films and 13 audio reels from the Richmond, Virginia Police Department (RPD) Surveillance Records (1961-1973). The films were held by Rick Duling, former RPD officer, to document the Department’s surveillance of what they deemed subversive and counter-cultural groups in the metropolitan Richmond region. The films include footage of Black Panther Party meetings and activities in the 1960s; anti-draft, anti-war, and anti-bussing protests; student protests at local universities; marches including the Poor People’s Campaign, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, and the trial of H. Rap Brown. These films will provide new opportunities to investigate aspects of the civil rights struggle in the South among scholars from a wide variety of disciplines and locations. Through this project, VCU staff will preserve master files as well as clean and prepare original recordings for long-term storage, enabling future accessibility.
The materials proposed for this project come from our Gaydreams audio recordings collection. Gaydreams was a weekly radio show on WXPN in Philadelphia hosted by Bert Wylen from 1990-1996. During this time period the nation’s LGBT community experienced important and rapid change. The Gaydreams audio recordings (numbering 312 items) are composed of three magnetic media types—cassette tapes, reel tapes, and digital audio tapes—which are imperiled because of their age, format, and historic storage environment. We will partner with George Blood, LP to do this reformatting work. They will be cataloged in-house to provide access to scholars and community members through our Islandora digital collections site.
Appalshop Archive’s audiovisual collections contain over 18,000 primary source film, video and audio items that document life in the region from the 1930s to the present day. The content provides insight to the region’s folk traditions, social and religious practices, and labor history, as well as the socioeconomic and cultural effects of an industrial mono-economy over the course of a century. On July 28, 2022 a catastrophic 1000-year flood, exceeding the area’s worst-recorded flood by 7 feet, breached Appalshop’s building and immersed the organization’s archive in muddy water. We are requesting support to help rescue 75 flood-damaged 16mm film and videotape elements that document history, art, culture and social issues of central Appalachia.
With modern-day motion-activated cameras and high-powered lenses, capturing unique wildlife interactions has become commonplace. Until recently, the process of capturing nature through film was intensive and time-consuming. Large equipment was carried into remote areas to record just a few minutes of footage. But these films now contain rich scientific and historic assets with biological data and primary source material found nowhere else. The Chicago Academy of Sciences’ audiovisual collection contains hundreds of these films from field trips and expeditions across the world—but only a few have been digitized, leaving these resources essentially hidden from the public. Historic photographs, contextualized with field notes, expedition surveys, and specimens, have proven essential for modern-day conservation and restoration efforts. Films provide further depth to scientific knowledge and cultural heritage, capturing more detail about plant, animal, and human interactions, but also documenting how time and human influence has altered these habitats.
The Eastern Shoshone Tribal Archives possesses a collection of vital recordings of historic tribal government proceedings, sacred ceremonial songs, music and prayers, and elders speaking in their traditional native dialect. These recordings date back to 1978 and span until 2018, totaling 122 items with 8,938 minutes of run time. Despite being in good condition, these recordings are at-risk and inaccessible. To preserve these rare and unique audio and visual resources, the collection must be digitized. Master Enterprises, Inc. has been provisionally selected for the digitization, quality control, and metadata creation work. Once digitized, the project aims to make the recordings available to the public. However, certain culturally sensitive recordings may be restricted by a group of tribal stakeholders. Digitization will enable tribal members, scholars, and other researchers to engage with these valuable resources, ensuring that they are preserved for future generations.
FSU Libraries and the FSU Research Foundation seek funding to digitize, preserve, and make available audio and sound recordings from the William R. Jones Papers. Funds would be used to partner with a digitization vendor, and to fairly compensate metadata labor at FSU Libraries. Increased availability to these recordings will have global impacts on the fields of African American studies, theology, conflict resolution, and more. Due to the inherent instability and growing technical obsolescence of magnetic tape, it’s imperative that these recordings are migrated to digital formats for further preservation and access through existing FSU Libraries platforms.
As the oldest continually-performing arts organization in the United States, the Handel and Haydn Society has been a pioneer of music performance since 1815; however, its performance recordings are largely inaccessible due to storage on obsolete formats. H+H will partner with preservation experts from George Blood, LP, to digitize over 700 endangered audio recordings (including open-reel tapes, Betamax tapes, DATs, audio cassettes, and vinyl discs) produced between 1951 and 2007. This project will rescue the only surviving audio record of H+H’s performances, rehearsals, and radio broadcasts of that time. These recordings portray the organization’s seismic shift from an amateur chorus to a sleek and professional arts organization, and its leadership as a historically informed ensemble under several renowned leaders of the twentieth century’s early music revival. With its digital asset management system Preservica, H+H will ensure that the recordings are accessible online to scholars, performers, and music lovers worldwide.
Over a 12-month period, the Indiana Historical Society (IHS) will digitize and catalog 1,500 open-reel audio tapes of the WTLC radio program, Like It Is. WTLC was the first radio station in Indianapolis to provide 24-hour programming for African Americans and was known for their award-winning news programs. Like It Is began in 1976 and aired through 1991. With an emphasis on civil rights, health, social justice, education, and entertainment, the program featured interviews and stories that covered local and national topics. In 1995 and 2001, the audio tapes were donated to the Indiana Historical Society. Due to their format, the tapes are currently not accessible by the public. Despite optimal storage conditions, degradation will become an issue as the tapes near 50 years. Digitization of the tapes will not only provide long-term preservation of the contents but allow for full access to this collection through the IHS Digital Collection.
The La MaMa Archive will digitize our unique collection of VHS tapes containing performance footage from 1978-2006, during which time La MaMa fostered trailblazing artists such as Elizabeth Swados, Denise Stoklos, Andrei Serban, and George Ferencz. Footage features La MaMa artists on international tours, capturing consequential moments of cultural exchange in Italy, Turkey, Kosovo, India, and South Africa. In many cases, these tapes are the only existing video documentation of these works. Funds from CLIR’s Recordings at Risk program will enable the Archive to digitize the 100 most rare and significant of these tapes to further accessibility and scholarship. The catalog records with description and metadata will be discoverable on La MaMa’s digital collections site, with access copies held in the Archive. Preservation masters will be stored with our partners, Digital Bedrock. The newly digitized footage will provide artists, researchers, and students with invaluable insight into American cultural history.
The Ocean Exploration Trust oversees an audiovisual catalog of more than 150 deep-sea expeditions led by Dr. Robert Ballard. This collection spans 50 years of exploration and includes seminal, first-look imagery of historic discoveries including deep-sea hydrothermal vents, biological diversity new to science, and shipwrecks important to the marine archaeological record including discovery and exploration of RMS Titanic, battleship Bismarck, and over 60 ancient shipwrecks throughout the Black Sea.Only a small fraction of these dive recordings was made available to science given the limitations of transfer technology at the time. We cataloged available physical recordings at OET offices and prioritized deep-sea footage which contain data important to the marine archaeological record and scientific investigation. Digitization is a critical next-step that will enable integration of this catalog into our existing infrastructure for data archive, backup, review, and accessibility to the broader scientific community to view contemporary deep-sea footage by OET.
This project will digitize the significant number of recordings taken by the San Diego Natural History Museum throughout its 149-year history. These recordings contain irreplaceable information concerning scientific research and scientific education, including species data, species behaviors, and important context provided by curators and educators. The recordings are particularly important as some of the earliest scientific recordings of flora and fauna in Southern California, Baja California, and related areas. Digitizing these recordings, which are at significant risk of deterioration, will make them available to researchers across the world, and contribute to global efforts to preserve important biodiversity data.
Mary Ellen Hillaire was a groundbreaking intellectual and educator with a unique vision for intercultural exchange in education, laying the groundwork for the first Longhouse on a US college campus, academic support for tribal leaders, and a pedagogy centering students’ cultural background and knowledge. Coming from an oral tradition, Hillaire’s legacy includes two thousand audio recordings documenting her philosophy and pedagogy, as well as visits of significant Native American musicians, activists, and educators. This project seeks to digitize these currently inaccessible recordings and make them available to future generations interested in Indigenous higher education and Coast Salish culture.
The Noguchi Museum seeks to digitize approximately 25,000 feet of 16mm film, along with approximately 25,000 feet of 16mm magnetic audio film, from its archives. These recordings, which date from c.1978-82, constitute the complete raw materials created in the production of “A Sense of Place,” an unfinished full-length documentary on acclaimed artist Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) by filmmakers Denise Marika and Michael Rich. Focusing on Noguchi’s work on large-scale public works, ranging from playgrounds to gardens to landscape architecture, the materials include rare, never-before-seen footage of Noguchi at work—including during the creation of one of Noguchi’s most renowned projects, “California Scenario”—along with interviews with Noguchi about his philosophy of sculpture and public art. Many of these reels already exhibit signs of red-shifting and/or vinegar syndrome. To preserve their contents, the Museum seeks to stabilize and digitize these rapidly deteriorating materials, and to make them publicly available via its website.
The George A. Smathers Libraries (Libraries), University of Florida, and Burning Spear Media, LLC, will partner to digitize and make publicly accessible 1495+ audio and video recordings dating back to 1971. These media document the history of the Black Power struggle through activities of the Uhuru Movement. Recordings include conferences, workshops, Freedom Schools, Sunday Meetings, homeless activism, protest marches, speeches, electoral campaign activities, and activists’ personal accounts. Collection content includes 12 sessions of the International Tribunal on Reparations to Black People in the U.S., Huey Newton’s last speeches, and presentations by Omali Yeshitela in London and Africa. Recordings chronicle the survival, continuity and growth of the movement for Black Power and African Internationalism from 1971 to 1999.The Libraries will ingest and preserve these recordings, making them freely available through UF’s Digital Collections, offering rare resources for current and future generations of students, activists, journalists, filmmakers, historians and the general public.
The main objective of “Doubling Down: Preserving the Stories of the Workers and Dreamers Behind the Las Vegas Casino Industry” is to digitize approximately 800 unique audiovisual items found across a number of UNLV Special Collections & Archives (UNLV SCA) archival collections. Las Vegas is a worldwide leader in the Casino and Hospitality industry welcoming more than 40 million people annually. This material dates from approximately 1960 to 2005 and provides unique insight into the conception, construction, and marketing of casinos. The materials also document the lives of the casino workers, customers, and dreamers who built Las Vegas. Digital files will be made available to researchers in the UNLV SCA reading room. Preservation master files will be uploaded to Fedora/Amazon Web Services for long-term digital preservation and copies will be added to UNLV SCA’s secure servers.
The goal of this project is to provide access to open reel video tapes produced in South Carolina that document South Carolina’s Lowcountry folk art, crafts, and music during the 1970s. The Charleston Communication Center was part of a National Endowment for the Arts Regional program partnership and includes recordings of South Carolina crafts people and artists living in the Lowcountry. The material filmed by the center from 1970-1976 has enormous value to local and scholarly communities and are a unique and important resource for the public, for teaching, and for research in many disciplines. Because the material is currently inaccessible and endangered, digitization is the only way to ensure access to this important collection of historical material covering life and the arts in South Carolina. The direct scope of the project includes outsourced transfer of all video and audio reels resulting in HD and H.264 digital files.
Washington University Libraries requests $36,275.85 to digitize and reassemble almost 100 interviews conducted with Civil Rights activists from 1978 to 1980. Public television producer Jack Willis and SNCC member Jean Wiley conducted the interviews for their never-completed documentary The Civil Rights Project. While they interviewed major Civil Rights leaders like Rosa Parks and Stokely Carmichael, they spent most of their time talking to local activists in the cities in the South where the movement began.As the film was unfinished, these important interviews have never been accessible by scholars or the general public. This project will digitize 63,650 feet of 16mm film and 195 audio recordings that contain the more than 100 interviews and related on-location footage. The filmed interviews will be reassembled making them viewable for the first time. An Omeka exhibit will contextualize the digitized materials that will eventually be accessible in the Libraries’ in-development Piction-based repository.
Between 1916 and 1965, WCS’s Department of Tropical Research (DTR) undertook expeditions across tropical terrestrial and marine locales. Conducting what is now regarded as standard ecological research, the DTR were among the first Western scientists to study the interconnectedness of tropical wildlife and their habitats through close, first-hand observations. The DTR were additionally noteworthy in that they were composed of both men and women, hugely influential in their time, and that, beyond scientists, the team included artists, writers, and filmmakers. Their footage, which comprises the DTR Film Collection, not only documents the early history of Western conservation science, but it also includes rare and possibly unique documentation of landscapes, wildlife, and local peoples. The WCS Archives proposes to digitize the DTR Film Collection’s 88 reels and make them publicly available online. Access to these important recordings supports a variety of users, from historians and scientists to artists and the public.
The Military Women’s Memorial (MWM) collection of over 1,400 oral histories documents women’s service to our nation with narratives representing World War I to the present, from all military branches, as well as ancillary organizations. However, more than half of these stories are inaccessible. Varied legacy format recordings—subject to degradation—limit use at our onsite archives with limited publicly searchable content. As MWM creates new exhibitions, website content, and programming, digitizing the balance of the Collection will ensure these stories are preserved, and will support efforts to engage new and diverse audiences. This project will digitize 1,106 media items, revealing the untold stories of 844 military women, in a format suitable for long-term preservation, as well as MP3 and MP4 web-accessible format to facilitate web access and transcription. Descriptive metadata will enhance discoverability and access to the research community and other audiences through our Preservica Starter oral history digital collections portal.
Cecil Taylor (1929-2018) is recognized as an uncompromising visionary in the development of free jazz, and a pioneering composer, multi-instrumentalist, and poet. A classically trained virtuosic pianist, Taylor’s iconoclastic approach to jazz piano challenged prevailing notions of jazz and avant garde music, forming a truly unique oeuvre over his seven-decade career of solo and collaborative improvisations with luminaries including Steve Lacy and John Coltrane. Blank Forms proposes to digitize the most comprehensive archive of the artist’s late work, 1962-2010, and the most extensive collection of his live music, period. These recordings, which have never, or rarely, been made publicly available, significantly augment available resources for studying Taylor’s life, praxes, and sessionography, drawing the interest of filmmakers and scholars across disciplines. The project would digitize these obsolescent and fragile media and steward their long term preservation, making their contents accessible to the broadest possible audience into the future.
The Boston City Archives seeks funding to digitize and provide public access to community oral history recordings created by the Boston Bicentennial Commission between 1974 and 1976. Between 1974 and 1976, the Boston Bicentennial Commission recorded oral histories with a wide cross section of Boston’s residents, including members of Boston’s black and immigrant communities. Due to their age and over a decade of storage in poor environmental conditions, these tapes are at serious risk of degradation, and currently cannot be accessed. Transcripts and partial transcripts exist for approximately half of the recordings, and show that interview content includes immigration, the African American experience in Boston, Boston’s social movements, urban renewal, and a wide variety of local history topics. This project will preserve the recordings through digital reformatting, produce descriptive metadata for the recordings, and make the recordings available to the public in the Boston City Archives’ digital access portal.
The Archives will submit one-hundred-forty-three cassette tapes and ninety-five ¼” open-reel recordings for digitization through Mass Productions in an effort to make accessible and celebrate the heritage of the Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Boston (colloquially referred to as “CSJ”). The reels contain audio from Chapter meetings (1967-1969) during which the Sisters addressed the Second Vatican Council, which called for major social reform in the Catholic Church. The cassette tapes contain oral history interviews conducted in the decades following. The recordings are sisters’ reflections on life in the Congregation and reveal the cultural shift in religious life during the late 1960s. Once digitized, these recordings will be publicly accessible on an Omeka website and subsequently used in the Sisters’ sesquicentennial celebration in 2023. Themes reflected in the recordings include the history of women, Catholic education and deaf education, immigrants,1960s social movements, and the American Catholic experience.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) seeks to preserve and make accessible 233 live concert radio broadcasts of the Boston Pops conducted by John Williams recorded on 256 analog tapes. This unique collection documents Williams’ growing influence as a film composer including first concert performances of many of his scores, and featuring such guest artists as Jessye Norman, Leontyne Price, and George Benson as well as early career appearances by Wynton Marsalis, Bryan Stripling and Yo-Yo Ma. Recorded on ¼ inch reel-to-reel audiotape, these master tapes have become inaccessible due to the medium’s fragility and the obsolescence of playback equipment. Our vendor will create preservation master files and access files for public use, which will be discoverable via an EAD finding aid and the BSO’s online performance history search engine with links from WorldCat. Scholars often seek out this collection, which constitutes an important part of the BSO’s audio archive.
Bowling Green State University’s Music Library and Bill Schurk Sound Archives (MLBSSA), partnering with George Blood, L.P., will digitize filk analog audio recordings on unstable formats. As a musical genre, filk usually revolves around sci fi/fantasy topics and was originally performed in a folk-rock style. The term “filk” is used to describe both the musical genre and the active fan community that creates and sustains the music through conventions and gatherings. The project will digitize 201 commercial master recordings of filk music, containing both studio and live recordings, and 75 cassette tapes of interviews and field recordings. The project will allow MLBSSA staff to provide on-campus access, update existing finding aids, and pursue permissions to allow wider access, making the material more accessible for the filk community and providing primary source material for use by scholars and students at BGSU, as well as scholars researching filk and fandom.