| WEB NEWS | Monday, June 25, 2007
From Dust to Digital:
History student leads digitization effort of archived vintage radio programs

BY MATT GETTY

Jodi Boyle knew she was listening to something special the first time she heard the John R. Hickman Collection of vintage radio broadcasts in the AU Library archives. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s voice crackled through her headphones gravely declaring war in 1941; the opening theme to the classic radio soap opera The Romance of Helen Trent rang out on the strings of a ukelele, and she was hooked.

“To think of the history behind some of those broadcasts,” said Boyle, who was then a public history graduate student working part time in the library’s archives. “It just gives you chills to hear it.”

With recordings of 10,000 radio programs from the 1920s through the 1970s, the collection amassed by AU alumnus John Hickman ’64 held something for any history buff. The problem was finding that something took hours of research. Listening to coverage of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, a 1951 report from Edward R. Murrow, or a 1929 episode of Amos and Andy, for instance, wasn’t as simple as downloading a podcast.

“The lion’s share of the collection is on reel-to-reel audio tape, which makes it very hard to listen to,” said Susan McElrath, library team leader for special collections and university archives.

Boyle, who was taking a History in the Digital Age class at the same time she was creating an inventory of the Hickman reels, wanted to change that. “The class was focused on finding new ways of looking at history,” she explained. “This seemed like the perfect opportunity.”

Working with McElrath, Boyle launched an effort to make Hickman’s hidden treasures available over the Web. To do that, she enlisted help from audio technology major Michelle Reichling, who was eager to lend a hand. As Reichling’s professor Paul Oehlers put it, giving an audio technology student the chance to work with reel-to-reel audio was like letting a car enthusiast look under the hood of a Model T.

Over several months, Boyle, McElrath, and Reichling collaborated to create a Web site offering streaming audio of programs from the Hickman collection. Boyle chose the first six dozen programs to be digitized based on their historical relevance; Reichling then did the conversions.

“In addition to creating the high-quality wave file for permanent storage, we needed to compress that as an MP3 file for streaming on the Web,” Boyle explained. “The process takes more time than you might think”—more than two minutes for every minute of audio.

For her part, Boyle has spent scores of hours doing copyright research needed to clear the recordings for Web streaming, and on creating a searchable database for the collection.

Because of the daunting time commitment needed to bring old-time radio into the digital age, the collaborators decided to allow the collection to grow steadily .

The recently launched Web site currently hosts only a small fraction of the Hickman collection—around 60 programs—but that’s an important start. “The idea was to create a platform that we could add to over time,” McElrath explained. Once Boyle’s searchable database of all 10,000 records is completed, the library plans to convert additional shows to digital as individual program requests are made.

For now, with coverage of V-J Day in 1945, Marian Anderson’s 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial, and two dozen episodes of the 1950s’ news series Hear it Now, the site allows even casual historians to eavesdrop on a bit of history. And, Boyle hopes, it might even change the way they think about the field of history itself.

“Working on [this project] offered a glimpse of the future role of the historian,” she said. “ I learned about things you wouldn’t expect. I learned about FTP, what works on a PC versus a Mac, what it means to bounce audio . . . I think people still have a stereotypical idea of historians working with dusty artifacts, but that’s rapidly changing.”