Pop Up Archive: Standardized Preservation and Distribution of Culturally Significant Audio

FAIN: HD-51791-13

Kitchen Sisters Productions (San Francisco, CA 94133-5107)
Nikki Silva (Project Director: October 2012 to May 2016)

The development of open-source software tools and educational materials to facilitate the dissemination and long-term preservation of oral histories, radio broadcasts, and other audio content.

Pop Up Archive is a simple system to preserve audio content by making it searchable, reusable, and shareable in ways that are meaningful to scholars and producers. The Kitchen Sisters inspired and collaborated on the initial phase of the project, which entailed an academic survey of existing methods for storage of and access to audio content, as well as the alpha release of software plug-ins for Omeka. Phase two of the project, for which we are seeking a Level II Start-Up Grant, will finalize and test these plug-ins across public media organizations and oral history archives, create a centralized repository of audio records, and educate relevant communities through a shared web space. The system will be open source and will conform to national archival standards, without requiring technical expertise from participating organizations. For the first time, content can be indexed for safe and permanent preservation and made accessible to producers, scholars, students, and the public.