Digital Preservation Project
Digital Preservation Project
Our history is fragile! Please help us preserve it!
For 50 years The Philadelphia Society has recorded the voices of the conservative intellectual movement, but our collection is aging rapidly. We have both reel-to-reel and cassette tapes, and many of our earliest digital recordings are now in formats for which audio players are hard to come by.
We are now undertaking a Digital Preservation Project to ensure that future generations can hear the voices of Frank Meyer, Milton Friedman, and Fr. Stanley Parry who opened the first national meeting of the Society in 1965, Gary Becker, Daniel Henninger, and the Society’s past presidents at our 50th Anniversary meeting in 2014, and as many speakers as possible from the meetings in the years between.
In addition to our valuable audio file collection, the Society has a valuable archive of papers, tributes, photographs and other materials that help tell the story of liberty, shed light on the conservative intellectual movement in America, and document the history of the Society and the work of its members.
Deliberate attention and resources are needed to digitally preserve this material. Support is needed for special technical services and staff time to convert old media formats, digitize documents, and organize archival materials for storage and web presentation.
We are establishing a Digital Preservation Fund to collect special donations to have many of our files professionally converted and edited. Supplemental funds are also needed for ongoing website development and storage of our archival materials. A target budget of $25,000 has been established to cover the initial phase of file conversion, which will digitize all of our audio tapes and update digital files currently in obsolete formats. Future attention will be giving to preservation and interpretation of paper and digital files, as well as to raising funds to begin video recording meeting presentations.)
This will be a labor of love and a lasting legacy: If you would like to volunteer your time and have skills in project management, audio editing, knowledge of WordPress, or other technical skills in digital preservation and archiving, please contact Lenore Ealy.
(For more information on the process of digital preservation, see http://www.iasa-web.org/tc04/introduction-first-edition