On Feb 18, I was privileged to host a discussion of music archiving at the Folk Alliance conference in Kansas City. My very able and well-organized panelists were Steve Szymanski of Planet Bluegrass who discussed audio/video production and archives, and photography and book publishing; Mary Muse of Kerrville Folk Festivals who discussed the broad range […]
Colorado Collections Connection Meets on Audio Preservation
The Colorado Collections Connnection is a statewide organization of libraries, archives and museums that pursues training and policy development in areas of common concern. From a layperson’s viewpoint, these three types of entities might all seem the same, but they have different priorities and missions; professionals who work in these organizations tend to congregate with […]
You’re Not Alone – Millions of Analog Audio Recordings Await Digitization
Report from ARSC – Everybody Has Something Ann Blonston represented Airshow’s Restoration Center at the 2015 ARSC conference in Pittsburgh in late May. She describes the event as a entertaining mash-up of archive professionals and obsessive collectors. In these modern times, we have hundreds of thousands of recorded media items available to be listened to […]
Keep Your Recordings Safe: Best Practices for Analog Media Preservation
This post offers some simple tips to help collectors extend the life of analog recording media and prioritize their preservation for the long term. We live in a lucky time: we have sound recordings available to us at our very fingertips. Recorded sound surrounds us, and recordings – spoken or sung – are an almost […]
Archive-It! Be a cultural content aggregator using the Internet Archive
If you’re a composer of contemporary classical music, your works will live on in perpetuity-on the web, at least. New York University is archiving the careers of hundreds of contemporary classical composers in a web-based project that is scalable and viable for the long term. It includes recorded music content and manuscripts. It doesn’t require […]
Eight Steps to Protect Your Collection From Disaster
The fires and floods that struck Colorado in summer 2013, after a series of devastating wildland fires between 2010 and 2013, raised our awareness about the threats facing our studios and Airshow’s media archive. Recognizing the unpredictability of Mother Nature is one thing, but having a tangible plan to prepare for – and respond to […]
Naropa Archive Reaches Milestone
This month, Airshow completed the transfer of Naropa University’s complete analog tape collection: 4,148 recordings from the 6,000+-piece archive were transferred by four audio techs over 2+years, resulting in over 4,500 hours of digitized audio ready for online storage. Naropa was founded 40 years ago, during a wave of Western interest in Buddhism. Over the […]
Oral History: Capture the Best Interview
When I conducted oral history interviews as a college student, I knew something about interviewing (but not much!) and nothing about audio. Armed with a portable cassette recorder the size of a textbook with only a built-in microphone, I worked to gather recollections from elderly union members about events 30 years in the past. As […]