Mike Casey, coordinator of recording services for the Archives of Traditional Music on the Blooomington campus, illustrates the importance of the NEH grant and the types of materials the grant will help preserve. Cole

NEH Chairman Bruce Cole, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of art history and comparative literature at IU Bloomington, presented the Preservation and Access Research and Development grant during a news conference Feb. 3 at the Indiana Memorial Union in Bloomington.

Sound archives have reached a critical point in their history, marked by the rapid deterioration of original recordings, the development of new digital technologies, and the decline of analog formats and media. Most sound archivists believe that old analog-based preservation methods are no longer viable and that new strategies must be developed in the digital domain.

ATM, in collaboration with Harvard’s Archive of World Music, will use the NEH grant to maintain historic and highly valuable sound recordings of extraordinary national interest. The “Sound Directions: Digital Preservation and Access for Global Audio Heritage” project will create best practices and test emerging standards for archival audio preservation and storage in the digital domain. Different institutions may be able to adopt these methods and attain digital preservation without completely overhauling their existing operations.

The creation of interoperable audio preservation files is a groundbreaking and critical step to a complete digital audio preservation process, said Daniel Reed, ATM director and assistant professor of folklore and ethnomusicology at IUB.

“As the caretakers of unique, irreplaceable collections representing cultures from around the globe, we must solve the problem of preserving our endangered audio resources. The NEH grant will enable us to solve the problem of preserving audio resources accurately, reliably and for the long term, while making these recordings readily accessible to those who most need them. Only when we can feel assured that we have new programs in place that ensure the survival of our threatened cultural heritage can we reliably take advantage of the dramatic expansions of access that digitization and the Internet afford,” Reed said.

The recordings chosen as test cases for “Sound Directions” will be drawn from the rich ethnographic field collections of the IU and Harvard archives. Selected collections at ATM include music of Iraqi Jews in Israel, music from pre-Taliban Afghanistan, African-American protest songs from the 1920s through the 1940s, and music related to the world’s longest running civil war in Sudan.

IU’s ATM is one of the largest university-based ethnographic sound archives in the U.S. Its holdings cover a wide range of cultural and geographical areas and include commercial and field recordings of vocal and instrumental music, folktales, interviews and oral history, as well as videotapes, photographs and manuscripts. For more than 50 years, it has been a recognized leader in the sound archiving community, developing in step with technological and theoretical advances in ethnographic research and recorded sound.

ATM has received several major grants over the years from federal agencies such as NEH and private foundations. One digitization project, funded by the NEH, resulted in the interactive CD-ROM publication Music and Culture of West Africa: The Straus Expedition (Gibson and Reed, 2002). ATM also has collaborated with the IU Digital Library Program to create online access to many items in IU’s extensive collections pertaining to the life and career of songwriter Hoagy Carmichael.

ATM will again partner with the IU Digital Library Program on “Sound Directions,” which will unfold over 18 months beginning this month. An advisory board of technical experts will evaluate the project’s results.

The Archive of World Music at Harvard, which was established in 1976, is devoted to the acquisition of archival field recordings of music worldwide as well as commercial sound recordings, videos and DVDs of interest to ethnomusicologists. The archive boasts what likely is the largest collection of Indian classical music in the U.S.

NEH is an independent grant-making agency of the U.S. government dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation and public programs in the humanities. Preservation and Access grants are given to support research and development projects that advance the nation’s capacity to preserve and provide access to humanities resources. NEH particularly encourages projects that feature the innovative use of digital technology. Awards normally are for two years and have ranged from $130,000 to $350,000.

http://www.indiana.edu/~libarchm/

http://hcl.harvard.edu/loebmusic/awm-about.html

http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/sounddirections/