Grant awarded to help digitally preserve music collections

The IU Archives of Traditional Music has received a grant of more than $300,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitally preserve the field work of researchers going back to the 1930s. \nThe archives hold hundreds of thousands of hours of music from cultures around the globe on a variety of recording formats, some of which are rapidly deteriorating.\nThe collection is second in size only to the traditional music archives in the Library of Congress.\n“This is very highly valuable field work,” said Daniel Reed, archives director and assistant professor of folklore and ethnomusicology. “Many of these collections are quite old.”\nOver the next 18 months, the current digitization efforts will focus on collections from American Indian tribes and African communities. One collection was gathered over the course of 15 years.\nThe entire set of works makes up several hundred hours of audio.\nThe audio is digitized through a process that ensures a perfect, high resolution copy is made. \nReed estimates that about 1 percent of the entire collection has been digitized so far, which has already taken about 1.7 terabytes of space, which is the equivalent of 34 dual-layer Blu-ray discs, the largest capacity disc commercially available.\n“People want to be able to get as close as possible to the original recording to experience it,” Mike Casey, associate director of recording services, said in a press release . “Because we are an archive, we can’t provide them with access to the original recording, but we can provide them with information that helps them understand more deeply the recording and its original format and condition.”\nThe long-term goal for the archive is to eventually digitize the entire collection, which Reed admits is a daunting task.\n“We currently have 2,000 field collections,” he said. “And each collection can be just a few tapes or hundreds of tapes, discs and files.”\nThe archive is in the process of procuring more funding for the project, but in the next few years they hope to make at least parts of the archive easily accessible to students, researchers and the general public.\n“We are sitting on a mountain of unique cultural heritage we have been charged with preserving,” Reed said.