The Conference on World Affairs Archive Online: Digitization and Metadata for a Digital Audio Pilot

The University of Colorado Archives holds a substantial collection of audio recordings from the Conference on World Affairs (CWA), held annually at the University since 1948. Recordings of Conference sessions from the 1950s to the present comprise approximately 8,000 hours of material on reel‐to‐reel, cassette, and audio‐only VHS tapes. In 2009 the Archives, along with other units of the CU Libraries and the offices of the CWA, began the pilot phase of a project to digitize these materials to make them accessible to the public. Between December 2009 and March 2010, the pilot produced 80 digitized recordings, with 15 receiving full metadata provision and presentation in the CU Digital Library in time for the 2010 Conference on 05 April. This paper describes the history and significance of the Conference and the collection; the project team; the planning and funding of the pilot; physical characteristics of the collection; the digitization rationale, specifications and process; metadata design and creation; and delivery of the content to the public. Introduction In 2009 the University of Colorado (CU) Archives, together with other units of the CU Libraries and the offices of the Conference on World Affairs (CWA), began a project to digitize a substantial collection of audio recordings from the Conference. This project not only increased access to a significant resource, but it also gave the team an opportunity to develop workflows for digitizing audio collections. While Libraries staff had extensive experience digitizing image and text based collections, audio digitization presented new challenges. This paper presents a case study of the CWA Digital Audio Archive with the intention of sharing the Libraries' experiences with other institutions that may be embarking on their first audio digitization project. Specifically, this paper establishes context for the Conference, describes the collection, and details the planning, funding, digitization, metadata, and delivery of the material. 1. Conference/Content Every spring, luminaries from a broad range of disciplines and thousands of attendees are drawn to Boulder, Colorado to participate in the CWA, an event that is unique in both breadth of topical coverage and format. The first conference was an impromptu gathering organized by Howard Higman, CU professor of Sociology, in 1948 featuring Louis Dolivet, editor of United Nations World magazine. While the early days of the conference focused on international affairs, the subject matter quickly broadened to include science, technology, the arts, politics, spirituality, pop culture, ethics, the environment, and much more. 7/6/2015 The Conference on World Affairs Archive Online: Digitization and Metadata for a Digital Audio Pilot http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march11/dulock/03dulock.html 2/10 Roger Ebert, a long‐time speaker, describes it as the "the Conference on Everything Conceivable." (Conference on World Affairs, n.d.). The week‐long conference is comprised of approximately 200 panel sessions, plenary speeches, and performances. Unlike many conferences in which specialists deliver prepared speeches, CWA speakers extemporaneously discuss and debate a wide range of topics. The dialogue is always lively and the perspectives fresh, because panels are composed of speakers from a variety of disciplines and spheres — science, the media, academia, the arts, and politics to name a few. The list of former conference speakers reads like a who's who of the last 60 years, among them Steven Allen, Joseph Biden, Norman Cousins, Roger Ebert, Buckminster Fuller, Molly Ivins, Henry Kissinger, Charles Krauthammer, Paul Krugman, Annie Liebowitz, George McGovern, Arthur Miller, Ralph Nader, Eleanor Roosevelt, Studs Terkel, Norman Thomas, and Ted Turner. The conference is free and open to the public, attracting as many as 92,000 people in 2010. Attendees are drawn in large part by the opportunity to interact with the panelists. In fact, audience participation is a key to the distinctiveness of the event; the question and answer period for most sessions lasts 30‐40 minutes. Recognizing the educational value of the event, local universities and high schools encourage their students to attend and the conference organizers ensure that students are given time to interact with the conference speakers. 2. Significance Organizers had the foresight to record the conference sessions since the late 1950s, capturing and preserving this extraordinary event for future generations. The resulting CWA archive, housed in the CU Archives, contains more than 8,000 hours of audio as well as conference programs, presenter's biographies, photographs, and other materials related to the conference. Sessions selected for the first round of digitization illustrate this collection's significance. Examples include the 1961 NATO as Nation panel led by Henry Kissinger, a 1972 rap session between journalist Timothy Findley and Black Panther founder Huey Newton, and the 1980 Women as Soldiers panel. Unlike most public speeches, these sessions were unscripted. Speakers spoke candidly and in some cases found that their own opinions were forever changed by the debate. For instance, speaker Samuel T. Cohen, a nuclear weapons tactics theorist and Pentagon consultant, writes [S]ome 17 years later, the Conference hasn't changed, but I think I have. I have gone through a reappraisal of my views. I no longer believe in going out into the world and dropping bombs on Peking, Moscow. I'm still a nuclear Hawk when it comes to self‐defense, but I've changed my mind about the containment of communism; I no longer believe in the domino theory. This metamorphosis came about because of the Conference (Higman, n.d., quoted in Montgomery, 2008). The CWA archive not only captured the spontaneous and candid musings of some of 20th century's most influential figures, but it also has traced the evolution of certain issues over time. For example, nuclear proliferation, Israel and foreign policy in the Middle East, women's issues, the environment, and civil rights are examples of reoccurring themes discussed at the conference. Thus, as an online resource, the CWA archive has great historic value and broad appeal to a wide range of individuals from a high school student learning about the ethics of science, to a movie enthusiast listening to insights from her favorite director, to humanities scholars doing research in any number of disciplines. 3. Team The project team includes members from the CWA and several different departments within the University Libraries, as well as the digitization and web site vendors. The Director of Public Affairs at the CWA served as one of the project coordinators and provided not only extensive background on the collection and the conference, but also established lines of communication amongst team members from the different organizations. A member of the Committee for the CWA developed project goals and procedures, secured volunteer labor, solicited in‐kind contributions from the digitization and website development vendors, and acted as the primary point of contact between the Libraries, the CWA and the vendors. The Faculty Director of the CU Archives served as the other project coordinator, contributing valuable insights as the collection manager. The Digital Initiatives Librarian from the Libraries Information Technology (LIT) department took part in discussions about the digitization of the analog audio, as well as worked closely with the Metadata Librarian from the Cataloging and Metadata Services department (CMS) to create a template for descriptive metadata and the presentation of the materials in the CU Digital Library (CUDL). Other members of LIT set up a server to stream the digital audio files. The Metadata Librarian selected the metadata schema for the descriptive metadata, built the template for metadata input, and consulted with the CWA regarding assembly of descriptive and technical metadata. A web design consultant developed a website to align the CWA archive with the CWA's main site's look and feel, and a high‐end multimedia services firm converted the analog audio to digital format. The partnership between Libraries and CWA personnel was close and heavily collaborative. Proximity afforded team members the opportunity to meet on short notice to discuss specifics throughout the project, and familiarity made communication fast and 7/6/2015 The Conference on World Affairs Archive Online: Digitization and Metadata for a Digital Audio Pilot http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march11/dulock/03dulock.html 3/10 easy. Questions and problems were swiftly addressed, and frequent messages among all parties kept everyone "in the loop." 4. Planning/Grants The 2010 CWA archive pilot has its roots in earlier efforts to make this material available to the public in digital form. In 2008 and 2009, the University Libraries and the CWA unsuccessfully applied for a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to fund the digitization and online presentation of a small subset of the CWA audio recordings. Thereafter, the Libraries and the CWA looked for other funding sources. In October 2009, they met with a new project team to discuss the previous efforts to secure funding, review project specifics, and discuss potential new funding sources. The team considered options using local donations, hiring an outside project manager, and utilizing internal resources. However, the need for cost savings, as well as other factors, resulted in the use of a combination of local expertise and in‐house labor to complete the project. A sample set of 80 tapes already had been selected for the previous grant applications. This set served as the pilot material. Metadata formats were selected for all materials in question: Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary Project (PBCore) for the audio (which comprises the majority of the collection); qualified Dublin Core (DC) for text documents such as conference programs; and Visual Resources Association Core metadata 4.0 (VRA Core) for photographs and other images. CWA would provide some existing administrative and descriptive metadata and conference volunteers would provide additional item‐level descriptive metadata for each audio session, for later conversion by CMS personnel into PBCore metadata within the Libraries' digital library metadata entry tool, Luna Inscribe. CMS staff would also have access to the digital audio streams in case further investigation was needed to provide suitable description. In addition, CMS would add a collection‐level MARC record to the Libraries online catalog with links to the digital objects, providing yet another access point for users. By December 2009, a plan was in place and work on the project could begin in earnest. The vendor selected for digitization, whose president has a long‐standing interest in the Conference, generously agreed to digitize the eighty pilot tapes at near‐cost using its facilities and equipment. In order to make some of the material available to the public online before the start of the 2010 Conference on April 5, all eighty tapes would be digitized, but full metadata provision and display in the CU Digital Library would only be completed for fifteen tapes, considered a reasonable subset to fully catalog and publicize before April. Digitization was to begin in December and continue until all eighty tapes were done. Metadata template completion, allocation of storage space for the audio files, volunteer creation of item‐level descriptions and metadata provision were to be completed from January to March. The target publication date was the last week in March, to allow some time for adjustments before the start of the conference.