Manuscript Library Oral Histories: "A tape in a paper haystack"
The paper describes the challenge of finding, evaluating and prioritising hundreds of audio tapes at the State Library Victoria (SLV). In 2007, Peter McGrath was awarded a staff fellowship to enabling him to thoroughly investigate and report on the audio collection in the library’s collection. Peter discusses the journey and outcomes of his fellowship in the Manuscripts library during the first half of 2008.The first hurdle was identifying the tapes in the library collection, many of which were embedded in boxes of papers. Many of the collections in the library contain mixed media, such as photographs and some audio tapes. Of the titles that were on the library catalogue, many records didn’t clearly identify the audio content, so various search methods and tactics had to be employed in the first place. Once found, a method of prioritising these tapes using various criterions – such as significance and vulnerability of the tape media was applied. Finally, the process and its findings will value add to existing catalogue records and create some new ones, as many new and unique titles were uncovered over the duration of the fellowship. Rather than individually add records to the Library catalogue, a method has been devised to ‘bulk ingest’ many records at once, enabling several hundred- even thousands of records from existing delimited data. This process has been directly linked to the imminent project of digitising selected Oral Histories, and now allows an organised strategy to be adopted.