Curation of Oral Tradition from Legacy Recordings: An Australian Example

© 2013 Dr. Nicholas ThiebergerHundreds of hours of ethnographic field recordings and their associated oral tradition were destined to be lost until the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC, http://paradisec.org.au) was established in 2003 to digitize and curate this legacy made by Australian academic researchers since the 1960s (Barwick and Thieberger 2006; Thieberger and Barwick 2012).1 These recordings in the languages of the region around Australia (broadly speaking, an area that includes Indonesia, Papua New Guinea [PNG], and the Pacific Islands) have high cultural value and are often the only records in these languages. Many languages in this region are spoken by few people and are in danger of being lost because of the pressure from neighboring languages or metropolitan languages such as Indonesian, Tok Pisin, English, or French, and so the records made a generation or more ago become all the more valuable. However, despite their unique heritage value, these recordings were not eligible to be preserved or curated by any existing Australian collecting institution. A group of linguists and musicologists planned PARADISEC and sought advice from relevant agencies (in particular from the National Library of Australia and the National Film and Sound Archive). This advice was particularly valuable in allowing us to determine appropriate metadata standards (we use Dublin Core and Open Archives Initiative metadata terms as a subset of our catalog’s metadata) and to understand the more hands-on requirements of cleaning and repairing moldy or damaged analog tapes. We then applied for and received infrastructure funding from the Australian Research Council. With a grant that was to last for just one year, we had to build a successful archive prototype that could then attract further funds