Preservation of and Increased Access to the 92nd Street Y Humanities Audio Archives

FAIN: PW-269432-20

92nd Street YM-YWHA (New York, NY 10128-1612)
Christopher Bynum (Project Director: July 2019 to present)

Digitization and description of 854 original audio recordings of humanities and literary lectures given at the 92nd Street Y in New York City from 1950 to 2008.

92Y is requesting funds for the digital preservation of and increased public access to 854 tape-based audio recordings in our Humanities archive. Dating from 1956, the Humanities Audio Archive captures and features lectures, conversations, debates, and panel discussions across the fields of language arts, fine arts, performing arts, cinema, philosophy, history, and Jewish studies, as well as jurisprudence, anthropology, sociology, psychology, media studies, gender studies, and cultural studies. These recordings provide a truly distinguished record of public discourse on the questions and issues that helped define the second half of the twentieth century and first decade of the twenty-first century in America, and feature some of the period’s most influential figures. For this stage of its large-scale media preservation efforts, 92Y is focusing on the digital preservation of its audio recordings contained on imperiled, increasingly vulnerable analog and digital tape-based formats.