Mountain Culture and History Captured in Podcast

Let me start out by saying that I am not going to get the three things done this week in whatever week of 23 Things this happens to be. We are supposed to explore creating podcasts, recorded sound, video, and a combination of still images and sound. While I have not made the recordings myself, I have worked on a collaborative project to design an iTunes U page for the Archives of Appalachia and to select items from our collection to make available through this page. So far, we have digitized and uploaded over 200 short segments from our recorded sound collection. The site is intended to be a sampler from our collection. You can find our site at http://www.etsu.edu/itunes and then click on the link to the Archives of Appalachia or http://ow.ly/1fHRO

We designed the page around subject categories and topics of interest. We used the following broad categories: Music, Life Cycles - From the Cradle to the Grave,Oral Traditions - Tales and Lore, Life and Times - Stories from Our Past, Subsistence Traditions or Just Plain Living, and Religion. We deliberately chose to use short segments from our oral history collection and folklorists field recording collections, because the people from Digital Media Services in the e-Learning Division told us that the number of downloads on iTunes U would decrease dramatically beyond 15 or 20 minute length segments. While the archivist in me is a bit troubled by presenting these podcasts without the context of the longer recorded interviews, I have been pleased with the use of the site. We have averaged 2000 to 3500 downloads per week. Even at the lowest number, it would be the equivalent of pulling 400 items per day. If our entire staff did nothing else, we could not match this on-line service statistic with in-person service. It reminds me of the traditional song, "John Henry," that recounts a race between a railroad man driving a steel drill by hand and a steam powered drill while building the Big Ben Tunnel in West Virginia. I can relate to John Henry dying with the hammer in his hand. Sometimes I feel like an archivist dying from technology overload, still clinging to the gray manuscript box.

We hope to continue building our iTunes U site and add video recordings to it. We also hope that with our new web page that we can provide additional background information on the collections and speakers and performers featured in the site. All in all, I am pleased with the iTunes U site and believe that it has been worth the effort. We did receive some recognition for it this past Sunday in the local newspaper through a feature story about our digital efforts. http://www.johnsoncitypress.com/News/article.php?ID=74282

I do want to explore combining pictures and sound recordings. We hope to begin producing readings of our Civil War letters and diaries along with photographs and scans of the documents. We want to release them as a series--a continuing story--on iTunes U as part of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.