$187,082 is an oddly specific number but for the co-writers of a new grant for the UNC Library’s Southern Folk Collection, it’s far from arbitrary.
Richard Szary, the associate University librarian for special collections, was one of the three writers of the grant, which the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded to the library.
“We’ve been talking on and off with the Mellon Foundation for the past few years, pitching the idea that the Southern Folklife collection at the Wilson Library could use this opportunity with support from them to become a model for how to handle audio and moving image materials,” he said.
Szary said the process for handling incoming written manuscripts and book collections has been refined through years of experience and professional standards, but that’s not exactly the case for the media materials.
“With these media materials, like audio and moving image, there are standards but it’s much more ad hoc as the collections come in and what we really want to do is mainstream them so that we can handle them as quickly, effectively, and efficiently as we can for some of the more traditional types of materials,” he said.
Steve Weiss, the curator of Southern Folklife Collection, said the digitalization of this media is necessary for several reasons.
“One need is that the material itself is degrading,” he said.
Weiss said the collection largely comprises music related to southern folk life.
“Our collection is about a quarter of a million sound recordings,” Weiss said. “We also have about eight million feet of film and about 4,000 video recordings.”
