Spoken word audio gets the cold treatment
Thursday, July 30th, 2009
Today we’re delivering 172 audio tapes to Safe Sound Archive in Philadelphia where they will be put in cold storage to ensure their longevity. The tapes come from both the Quaker Collection and College Archives and include such content as the 1941 acceptance speech of Haverford honorary degree recipient Herbert Hoover and Howard Brinton’s 1960s lectures on Quakerism as well as a series of oral histories conducted from the 1990s through early 2000s on the history of Haverford College. The recordings, comprised of reel-to-reels and cassettes, have all been digitized and are gradually being uploaded to our DSpace repository. The digitized recordings will help to make the content more easily accessible, while the storage of the originals at one of the country’s premiere commercial audio archives will ensure that the master recordings remain viable should we ever need to transfer them again. Special Collections maintains hundreds more audio and video recordings and as time and funding allow we will continue to digitize and upload more content.