Extending the Reach of Audiovisual Sources in the American South

Housed within the Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, the Southern Folklife Collection (SFC) is one of the nation’s foremost archival resources for the study of American folk music and popular culture. Containing 250,000 sound recordings, 3,500 video materials, and over 8 million feet of motion picture film, the collection covers unique materials documenting southern musical and oral traditions on a variety of legacy formats.
In August 2014, the collection received a planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to investigate and develop workflows for prioritizing, describing, digitizing, and streaming SFC audiovisual collections for a large-scale preservation and access initiative. The proposed presentation will detail the research developed during the period of this initial grant, focusing on ways to support a high-throughput environment with improved workflows, practices and protocols.
In developing this model for digitization, the SFC confronted many challenges related to preservation, discovery, rights, and technical capacity. The research and documentation generated from this initial planning phase will be presented as a promising case study, and be instrumental in the further development of other national and international library initiatives involving the preservation of large analog audiovisual collections.