CLIR/Mellon Grant Awarded to Boston College Libraries Will Preserve Historic Music Recordings
In late 2017, Boston College Libraries was the successful recipient of a $30,775 Recordings at Risk grant to digitally reformat a selection of its unique audio collections. Entitled Sounds of Mid-20th Century Irish America: Preserving Historic Music Field Recordings for Research Access, the project focuses on two internationally-known collections in the John J. Burns Library’s Irish Music Archives that support the study of lrish traditional music. Experts from across the BC Libraries, in particular within the Irish Music Archives, Digital Library Team, and Archives, contributed to the proposal, which exemplifies core library values to preserve and make accessible heritage and research collections for the long term.
In the initial stages of planning, the Libraries’ Irish Music Librarian, Elizabeth Sweeney, identified two key archival collections of open-reel tapes of unpublished music—the James W. Smith Irish Music Recordings and Joseph A. Lamont Irish Music Recordings—as candidates for the desired digitization monies. The 1950s/60s music performances captured on the tapes feature some of New York and Boston’s most prominent Irish musicians at the time, and the informal nature and setting of the recordings—noncommercial “jam sessions” in public and private spaces—capture uniquely the time and spirit of this evolving musical genre. The Smith collection was acquired by the Libraries in 1992 and the Lamont collection in 2005, and though scholars have been aware of them, the tapes have not yet been available for listening.
The Sounds of Mid-20th Century Irish America project represents a classic case of high-value research content inaccessible without digitization and preservation. The majority of the recordings are in their original format of open reel-to-reel tapes, and are at risk of degradation and loss without digital conversion, preservation and archiving. CLIR’s highly competitive bidding process included a lengthy “independent, full scholarly and technical review that assessed scholarly value, cost effectiveness and technical competence”. Because the grant monies prioritized the long-term preservation of content, it was essential that a strong digital preservation record and commitment to standards-based metadata production be demonstrated, both areas that have been prioritized by the Libraries. The Northeast Document Conservation Center will be engaged for some digital reformatting services (cleaning, transfers, rewinding, splicing, file naming, and quality control), and staff in O’Neill and Burns Libraries will generate metadata, create finding aids, ingest files to MetaArchive for digital preservation, and ultimately, make arrangements for analog and digital storage and access.
Offering a sustained look at the same time period, the Smith and Lamont collections are distinct from earlier and later recordings of traditional music available elsewhere. When digitized, they will provide unprecedented opportunity to compare music communities in transition in two major urban hubs. The material will be of high value to musicologists, performers of Irish and folk music, and scholars of Irish-American history, cultural anthropology, and folkways of immigrant communities. When the digitized audio is available in late 2018, the Libraries’ announcements will encourage faculty, students, and the broader community to investigate and discover the research potential in these audio collections.
