The document discusses a project to virtually reunite related paper and media collections that have been split between institutions. Specifically, it aims to reunite the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) historic radio collection, which contains audio tapes held at the University of Maryland and related paper materials held at the Wisconsin Historical Society. The project will digitize materials from both collections and develop metadata using standards like EAD, PBCore and EAC-CPF to allow the audio and contextual information to be discovered and studied together online, providing new insights into the recordings and American history.

1. So I work at the University of Maryland in their digital humanities center, MITH,
which stands for Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. We work
with different departments on campus and also collaborate with other university
and archival insitutions to create tools for the study of the humanities. The
intersections of library/archival science and DH are frequently a nebulous concept
to folks on both sides of that coin, but MITH has been at the forefront of trying to
integrate and work with libraries and archives in ways which utilize their
methodologies and standards, while also pushing to innovate in ways that DH has
traditionally done. So the particular project I’m here to discuss is one that I believe
falls right on that border of a DH and archival digital project, and it concerns
something that digital humanists and some archivists typically call ‘virtual
reunification,’ which is when attempts are made to virtually reunite related digital
objects which have been separated amongst departments or institutions. In this
case I want to specifically discuss split collections of media and related
paper/textual collections – which are accepted into archival repositories and then,
for lack of a better analogy, “separated at birth.” [1:15]
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2. Often the “split but related mixed media collections” scenario occurs within an
institution that holds both paper and media materials, yet processes them
differently and in different departments. Other times, the paper and media
collections are also geographically separated.
For example, recently I’ve come across is the case of the Encyclopedia Cinematographica
collection, a mid century project coming out of Germany, which attempted to create
an encyclopedic archive of recorded movement as part of a of a postwar attempt to
reform the German film establishment. It attempts to break movement of various
species down into basic units, called ‘movement units.’ They also have a grid system
so users can compare, for example, the strikes of various serpents across different
species. They cover biology, ethnography and the technical sciences.
UMD film professor Oliver Gaycken is a current MITH Vambery Fellow. His project is called
“‘The Living Book of Knowledge’: Visions of the Moving‐Image Encyclopedia,” and it
traces the history of attempts to create moving image‐based enclopedias such as
this, from the late nineteenth century to the present.
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3. On the one hand, Gaycken is doing a sort of excavation of these various attempts to
create encyclopedias of movement, and on the other hand he’s trying to discern
why these movements always fail. So he has a need to conduct his research at both
a micro‐ and macro‐level. He needs to see the individual films, and whatever item‐
level descriptive data are available for them, and he also needs to understand WHY
certain decisions were made, both curatorially and organizationally in terms of the
project’s eventual failure.
The films are now at the HFSA and the Internet Archive, with minimal item‐level
metadata available for their study. The papers are in the hands of Vizenz Heidiger (U
Frankfurt), a scholar in Frankfurt, who has promised to give Gaycken access next
time he travels to Germany. No one knows at this point how those papers ended up
in the hands of Heidiger, but the fact that they weren’t’ retained as part of the film
collection is a quite typical scenario. (2:15)
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4. The facts surrounding this phenomenon can widely vary, but at a very base level,
long‐standing descriptive standards for processing paper collections simply diverge
from many of the needs of a audiovisual collection. Paper‐based collections are
most often described at the collection level, often resulting in an online finding aid.
Whereas often (but not always) institutions with significant audiovisual holdings
traditionally favor an item‐level approach, often with the aim of having the eventual
catalog return search results at a granular level (by title, producer, etc), but more
importantly to prepare a collection for a preservation effort which requires
metadata on item condition, formats, etc.
Then you have other instances where archivists with media collections are trying to find
ways to make traditional archival solutions work within their institutions for both. I believe
Mary Miller on this panel is doing this at UGA, and there are many other instances. Megan
McShea at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art just completed a large‐scale grant‐
funded CLIR Hidden Collections project wherein she developed methods for describing
media within EAD alongside paper components, while also separately creating item‐level
inventories when they were needed for preservation purposes. (1:10)
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5. Actually, when thinking about the very salient points that archivists make to defend the use
of each of these different approaches, I like to sometimes revisit an online discussion from
Spring2013 that occurred between McShea and AVPreserve’s Josh Ranger. Ranger originally
published a blog post entitled ‘Does the Creation of EAD Finding Aids Inhibit Archival
Activities?’ which posited that using EAD in the most traditional sense is problematic for
a/v collections, since EAD often has issues with discoverability through Internet search
engines, and partially because the lack of item‐level information does nothing to
prepare/plan for preservation efforts.
McShea replied to this post with a longer retort on the values of EAD for certain situations,
addressing many of Ranger’s points as valid, but arguing that in many cases, finding aids
become the easiest way for archivists dealing with mixed collections to deal with
institutional realities. And that, if proper measures are taken (as with the practices she’d
established at the Smithsonian, you can effectively combine item‐level and collection‐level
processing.Ranger’s reply was that every one of McShea’s points was also valid, but then
restressed a set of final points about EAD. That item level processing is really the only
way to tell what’s what and find the right pieces to preserve or transfer for access,
and that EAD does not achieve this level of need. In my view the reliance on EAD
has resulted in it becoming an endpoint or cul de sac, not a pivot point.” (1:20)
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6. This brings me to the project I’ve been trying to get funded and deployed for some time,
which aims to virtually reunify a historic radio collection with its associated paper
collections. The split collection is question is the National Association of Educational
Broadcasters (NAEB) historic radio collection.
The mission of the NAEB was to use communications technology for education and
social purposes. It was by all accounts an extremely successful and effective trade
organization that, throughout its 60 years of existence, and ushered in or helped to
enable major changes in early educational broadcasting policy. The forerunner of
the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its arms, National Public Radio (NPR)
and the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), the NAEB served as the primary
organizer, developer, and distributor for noncommercial broadcast production and
analysis between 1925 and 1981 (note: the NAEB tape collection only covers the
period through 1970). Beginning with low‐wattage AM frequencies and later
moving into FM, the broadcasts balanced focusing on public service reporting of
national events (e.g., the economy, the depression, World War II, the Civil Rights
movement) with providing a forum for local issues (e.g., agricultural prices,
community events, elections) and with expanding public education.
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7. The central premise of Unlocking the Airwaves is that the NAEB materials, which are
currently split between the Mass Media and Culture collections of the University of
Maryland Libraries Special Collections and University Archives (tape collection), and
the Wisconsin Historical Society (paper collection) can be opened to new research
through coordination of archival and digital humanities work that will allow users to
discover and use the digitized audio in an effective online research environment
alongside information about its creation and original context.
The finding aid for the NAEB paper collection alone reveals that it contains a depth
of contextual information relevant to the study of the tape collection. Digitized
paper materials from Wisconsin would reveal even more, and not just the content
of the broadcast but also the circumstances of its production and its reception. This
relevant contextual information related to both the subject matter inherent in the
content itself, as well as the cultural and sociological forces which shaped its
production and distribution. The NAEB collections account for more than a record
of a specific broadcasting entity and its industrial/narrative production. They also
provide an in‐depth look at the engagements and events of American history, as
they were broadcast to and received by the general public in the twentieth century.
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8. This may be evident in the recordings themselves, but the potential scholarly and
educational insights are particularly apparent when presented with rich, contextual
materials to accompany it.
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10. To do this, we will be working from data organized according to two major
descriptive standards: Encoded Archival Description (EAD), and PBCore, a metadata
standard for audiovisual media. The EAD standard will be used to establish
information at the collection‐level to provide context for (separate) item‐level
descriptions, which utilize PBCore. Over the course of the project, we will add work
with another, more recent standard, Encoded Archival Context—Corporate bodies,
Persons, and Families (EAC‐CPF), to capture information we gather about people,
organizations, and other entities related to public media collections.
Our model for the metadata system we will use for Unlocking the Airwaves will be
that created for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), which in turn builds on
metadata I ntegration work by Europeana, the major cultural heritage aggregator in
Europe. DPLA ingests metadata from many different institutions through its system
of “hubs.” By using linked data approaches and formats, the DPLA can map this
information into a profile usable by its online portal while still retaining the
semantics and the provenance of the original data. At ingest time, DPLA hubs also
enhance this metadata by performing additional linking to other common datasets
and authority files—such as for geographic locations. Unlocking the Airwaves will
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11. ingest information encoded in EAD, PBCore, and EAC‐CPF to create new data in the
same JSON‐LD (for “linked data”) format published by organizations like DPLA, but
specifically tailored to the use case of this project. . The mapping of EAD (a
document‐centric format) into linked data (which is naturally network‐centric) will be
the most challenging element of this process but models already exist. The LOCAH
and Linking Lives projects in the UK have not only demonstrated that such
transformations are feasible, they also have provided software that our project will
be able to adapt to this end.
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12. Despite the many excellent platforms for digital collections—from Omeka to
Drupal—these kind of all‐in‐one solutions focus attention—in the form of resources
for both development and maintenance—on one particular tool or website, rather
than on the reusable data and digital objects a website may contain. The overall
design of Unlocking the Airwaves thus favors discrete, composable units and the
provision of multiple ways of accessing project data.
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