Mellon Foundation Awards Nearly $1 Million Grant to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library
From UNC-Chapel Hill:
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has received a grant of $986,000 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This grant will help the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library advance digitization of rare audio, video and motion picture films for preservation and access.
Activities for the grant, “Extending the Reach of Southern Audiovisual Sources,” will begin in August.
Scholars, musicians and even filmmakers such as Martin Scorcese have found inspiration in the Southern Folklife Collection (SFC) and its quarter-million sound and video recordings and millions of feet of motion picture film.
“We’ve become very good at digitizing smaller portions of the collection, but these methods do not scale up,” said Steve Weiss, director of the SFC. “Thanks to the Mellon Foundation, we will be able to solve problems of preservation and access for thousands of valuable items in volume, and deliver them online.”
The Library will use grant funds to build an authoritative data repository to support workflow; optimize processes in order to manage the collection and digitize recordings on a large scale; produce preservation-quality master files; and deliver research-quality access copies via online streaming.
Among the materials that the SFC will digitize are thousands of hours of field recordings from the collections of folklorists Guy Carawan, William Ferris, Archie Green and Mike Seeger, among many others.
The grant also includes funding that will allow the SFC to conduct research and share knowledge about the best methods for large-scale digitization of multimedia collections. A Southern Folklife Audiovisual Research Fellowship will engage visiting scholars with the work of the collection.
The grant builds upon a prior planning grant from the Mellon Foundation that developed recommendations for preserving the SFC’s fragile multimedia components before they begin to deteriorate.
Visit the Southern Folklife Collection Online
See Also: More than 1600 Rare Audio Recordings by Roots Music Legends Donated to UNC University Library’s Southern Folklife Collection (June 24, 2015)
Filed under: Awards, Data Files, Digital Preservation, Funding, Libraries, News, Open Access, Preservation, Video Recordings
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.