Archive grant to preserve rare music

Music from pre-Taliban Afghanistan and African-American protest songs of the 1920s are sitting in IU's Archives of Traditional Music, rapidly deteriorating. The ATM houses more than 110,000 recordings -- some on aluminum disks from the 1930s, others on wax canisters dating back to the 1890s. These media, nearly all of which are rapidly losing data, hold some of the world's only recordings of songs of the Dinka people -- long oppressed by the Sudanese government, as well as recordings of Sufi and Shi'a Islamic practices from India and Pakistan.\nFortunately, the National Endowment for the Humanities has given the archives at IU and Harvard University's Archive of World Music a nearly $350,000 grant to research the best ways to digitally transfer, store and preserve the rare media.\nBruce Cole, the NEH chairman and a distinguished professor emeritus at IU, presented the Preservation Access Research and Development Grant at 4 p.m. Thursday in the University Club of the Indiana Memorial Union. He said the grant was necessary to help preserve the media archived at IU and Harvard.\n"They have very important sound recordings that need to be preserved," Cole said. "These recordings document important areas of culture and civilizations that have been collected over the years."\nThe process of preserving the media for the digital age is not as simple as just burning it on to a CD, said Mike Casey, the coordinator of recording services at the ATM.\n"The ultimate goal is to provide for long-term storage in a way that uses standards, in a way that ensures that the content does not become obsolete, and in a way that we can exchange preserved content," he said. \nCasey said the data storage must preserve the music for generations to come.\nTransferring its archives to digital form put the ATM on the cutting edge, said director Daniel Reed.\n"This is a fundamental shift from the analogue world to the digital world, and doing digital audio preservations is very important," Reed said.\nCasey said the grant, which the ATM is splitting with Harvard's Archive of World Music, will go to hire a professional audio engineer, a project engineer and a computer programmer, all for one year. These new hires, along with the existing staff at the archives will be researching a method for safe, secure and durable preservation storage for the archived data.\nOnce a suitable storage method is found, the ATM will begin transferring and uploading their media to University servers and the data will become part of IU's Digital Library Program. The archive has already sorted through recordings and given some a higher ranking for digital transfer, Casey said. \n"We have selected pretty carefully what is the highest priority for recording," he said. "We looked at the recordings for research value and for preservation -- how quickly they're deteriorating." \nResearchers deposited many of the works in the archives after they recorded them for their own work. \nReed said ideally most of the recordings will be available to professors for use in courses. He said some of the data would also be available on the Internet. But he said the current trend prevents archives from posting much of their content because of intellectual property laws. Reed said he hoped the ATM can take a leadership role in making as many recordings as possible available to the public.\nDespite all the emphasis on the data and media, he said, the content of the recordings themselves are what most important.\n"Ultimately, the Archives of Traditional Music is not about media," Reed said. "It's about the people whose recorded history we've been given the enormous responsibility and the enormous privilege of preserving." \n-- Contact Staff Writer Michael Zennie at mzennie@indiana.edu.