Do you want to add your collections to the SpokenWeb database and search engine?

Since the introduction of portable tape recording media technologies in the 1960s, writers and artists have been documenting their performances of literary works, events and conversations with creative abandon. Yet, many of these audio collections remain inaccessible or in peril of imminent decay, or, if digitized, are still largely disconnected from each other. SpokenWeb works to develop coordinated and collaborative approaches to literary historical study, digital development, and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of literary sound recordings from across Canada and beyond. Some of the core approaches we take to help mobilize collections involve digital preservation and aggregation techniques, asset management, and some basic infrastructure to support sustainable access of a wide range of literary recordings for use by researchers, teachers, literary practitioners, and the general public. Our work begins with the preservation and description of sonic artifacts that have captured literary events of the past, and this leads to a wide range of approaches that allow us to activate these artifacts in the present.

If you think you hold a collection of tapes or digital recordings that might be a good fit with the SpokenWeb project and are interested to learn how you can add those recordings to our database so they can be discovered and used, then read on!

Why would you want to add your collection to the SpokenWeb database?

Sound (and video) recordings that have not been commercially released – like documentary recordings of poetry readings, small run poetry tapes that are now ‘out of print’, recordings of literary-oriented radio shows, conferences, class lectures, etc. – are relatively useless objects. No one knows they exist, we don’t necessarily know what they contain, maybe they can’t be played because the equipment to do so isn’t available. You get the idea.

If you feel you have a collection of AV materials that might be of interest to literature scholars or practitioners, then you may want to engage in the process of digitally preserving your recordings, describing them in a structured way, exploring legal and ethical questions of making them accessible, and adding them to a data set that is served up to be searched by the public. This will give your collection visibility (or audibility) in new ways to those who would be most interested in hearing and studying them. It will also add valuable content to the rare corpus of materials that document literary history through sound and video documentation of performances, events, and communities. Such literary recordings are rare and valuable cultural heritage materials that enable an entirely new way of thinking about literary history.

Whether it’s a recording of a single event, a one-off tape that was released as a novelty item with a book, or a bunch of recordings that document a series of events, such items have the potential to add to our knowledge and understanding of what literature has been, done, and meant in Canada since the 1950s.

Adding information about your collection of recordings to the SpokenWeb dataset will allow them to be searched and understood in relation to thousands of other records that, together, constitute Canada’s AV literary heritage.

What kinds of collections fit here?

Did you organize a reading series at some point in your life, and did you record those events on tape or video? Did you do a series of interviews with writers and still have the recordings of those interviews? Did you DJ a literary radio show of which you have recorded copies of some of the episodes? Did you collect rare spoken-word our sound-poetry tapes that are no longer in circulation? These are just a few examples of the kinds of collections that might be appropriate for the SpokenWeb data set.

As noted above, we are interested in adding recordings that document “literary” performances, events, and communities that have taken place in Canada since the 1950s. “Literary” is the key word. It’s a word that is vague enough to be quite inclusive, but also definitive enough to exclude materials that are not literary in their orientation. The “genre” of the recordings can be diverse, so long as their main focus and content would be of interest to scholars and historians of literature and literary performance. Recordings of poetry and other kinds of literary readings and performances (sound poetry, slam poetry, etc.), literary soundworks, interviews with authors, lectures and roundtables at literature conferences, recordings of literature being taught, discussions of literature on the radio, all would qualify as literary recordings according to our definition of that category. Recordings of other kinds of arts or cultural communities may be outside the scope of the SpokenWeb data set.

If it is not obvious to you, or if you’re not sure if the recordings you hold would be considered “literary”, the best thing to do is check with us and we can consider and discuss the suitability of your collection for this project together.

How do I assess what I have and where to begin?

If you hold a collection like this and would like to make it more useful to researchers and writers, then the first step will be to produce a rough catalogue of the materials you hold. This will entail providing:

1. A short description of the contents. What do they document?
2. Information about the extent of the collection (i.e. how many tapes or MP3 files, how many hours of recordings?)
3. Information about the AV format(s): are they cassette tapes, digital files, etc.?
4. Status of digitization: If they are analogue materials, have they been digitized?
5. Information about where the tapes and/or digital files are stored?
6. Information about rights and access: Are they already available online. Who made these recordings and who holds the rights to these recordings (if you know?)
7. Any existing itemized list or description of the collection that you or someone else may already have produced.

A note about digitization: In some cases, it may be necessary to digitize analogue assets in order to even begin to learn what a collection contains and to begin to describe it. During the assessment process, we will determine whether digitization seems necessary, and the degree to which we (SpokenWeb) may be able to assist in digitizing your collection.

We have developed a form that integrates these questions so that you can produce a rough catalogue with as many answers to the above questions as possible.

Complete the appraisal form online.

Next steps after appraisal

Once the form has been completed and submitted, and the collection is deemed appropriate to aggregate with the SpokenWeb data set, the next step is to develop a more detailed catalogue of the collection, in accordance with a paired-down version of  the SpokenWeb metadata schema (a series of fields to structure important information about the recordings).

In order to integrate your collection with the SpokenWeb data set, we need both links to the digital files (if available) and the metadata that provides information about each one. If you have not yet catalogued or described your collection, or you only have some limited unstructured metadata, then we can offer two ways for you to do this:

1. Catalogue the collection directly in Swallow, our metadata management system, or
2. Catalogue the collection using our Core Fields Template (available as an online spreadsheet template).

We can discuss which strategy is best depending on your resources. It is important to consider the implications of using a smaller or greater number of fields in the metadata description process. The more fields that are used in describing an AV collection, the greater the options for searching, discovering, and connecting an AV collection to the larger corpus of recordings described and held in the SpokenWeb data set. Committing to use a greater number of descriptive fields also demands greater resources (more time, more effort, perhaps more research about the contents of the recordings), and so may not always be feasible. The main goal is to strike the right balance between description that enables rich discoverability but that is completely feasible to complete. There is no point in choosing to include a large number of descriptive fields if that work in description cannot be completed. In short, usually the more fields the better, but ultimately it must be the number of fields that are possible to complete.

We will discuss which fields will be included in the description of your collection as part of the work assessment process.

In the meanwhile, please consult our SpokenWeb Core Fields documentation about the SpokenWeb Mandatory (M), Mandatory if Available (MA), and Recommended (R) fields.

If you will be cataloguing directly in Swallow we will create a cataloguer account for you. After you log in you’ll be able to fill out the necessary fields. The instructions for Swallow cataloguing that uses the full schema can be found here: https://github.com/spokenweb/swallow?tab=readme-ov-file#user-interface.

If you use the spreadsheet template then first download or copy the sheet, then enter the fields in the designated columns for each of the recordings in your collection.

If you have already created structured metadata using a known standard such as Dublin Core, then you must create a crosswalk document that maps your metadata to the SpokenWeb metadata schema.

An introduction to the crosswalk process is available HERE for download. As each crosswalk will have specific questions to address we would develop this collaboratively.