IU receives $850,000 grant for online digital archive

An $850,000 grant was awarded to a team of IU and University of Michigan researchers by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to begin the implementation phase of an online digital archive. \nStarted in 2001, the Ethnomusicological Video for Instruction and Analysis program will allow videos made of other cultures' music and dance to be preserved digitally, making access to these recordings easier to obtain. \nAn example of the utility of the project, Alan Burdette, executive director for the project, said, is the preservation of videos taken in Liberia before the civil war. Because of the devastation in the country, those tapes could have been lost. \n"If there's a war in their country, it won't affect these tapes because they'll be digitally preserved," said Ruth Stone, the director at IU's Ethnomusicology Institute. \nWhile access to these tapes is an issue, the main reason for digitalizing these archives is preservation. Videos made in the 1970s are on open reels, and it's becoming more difficult every year to find the equipment to play them back on, Burdette said. \nThe 1980s brought about VHS tapes that wear out a little more each time they're played. The average VHS tape only lasts about 10 years before deterioration begins, the color starts to fade and the picture becomes fuzzy, Stone said. While these tapes can still be played, Burdette said he worried about the future when this will no longer be the case. \nThe project has taken five years to reach the testing stage because it had to be built from the ground up. \n"We were trying to do something that had never been done before," Burdette said. \nThe digital archive had to be made compatible for libraries around the world so that the amount of people able to view the archive wouldn't be limited. Also, the transferring of videos had to be perfect so that information was not lost, and so when the time comes for the tapes to be transferred again, the format used will be able to be copied onto the new form of technology that will be created in the future.\n"You want to make sure you never have to do it again because the tape is deteriorating every year," Burdette said. \nStone said about 300 hours of video is now searchable, and they plan to begin the testing phase soon. \n"The next phase will be to make this available, to let people know about it," Stone said. \nBurdette said they hope that some of the videos will be available to the general public by spring.