From the Piedmont to the Swamplands: Preserving Southern Traditional Music

FAIN: PW-51081-12

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC 27599-1350)
Steven M. Weiss (Project Director: July 2011 to September 2016)

Preserving and making accessible online up to 3,019 hours of sound recordings and 4,500 related photographs dating from the 1920s to 1980s, drawn from the university's Southern Folklife Collection, that document the traditional music and musicians of the southeastern United States.

The Southern Folklife Collection (SFC) of the Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill plans to preserve and make accessible unique photographs and sound recordings documenting Southern traditional music. For this project, we will create preservation master files and reference copies from materials currently at risk or unavailable for public research. The digitized content will be made available to researchers via CONTENTdm and Variations, an online streaming system developed by Indiana University. Based on prior experience, we expect to preserve and make accessible up to 3,019 hours of audio recordings and 4,500 photographs over the project period.