Pop Up Archive from Mario Furloni on Vimeo.

Using new technology to preserve the sounds of the past was the focus of a SXSW interactive workshop that debuted Pop Up Archive, a Knight News Challenge winner, this week in Austin, Texas. Anne Wootton, one of Pop Up Archive co-founders, spoke to a group of content creators interested in taking media from the shelf to the web, about the challenges of pushing “archiving” as the next great catalyst for innovation. People hear the word archiving and it freaks them out she explained. “And if it doesn’t freak them out, it’s often on the bottom of [their] priorities list.” Pop Up Archive aims to change that, applying a simple and easy-to-use system to organize and access audio content and preserve it for future generations. It also uses the latest emerging technology to help its users manage many media files at once, automate transcription and make audio searchable in illustrative ways.   Wootton and the project’s other co-founder, Bailey Smith, also demoed the tool, which was developed with the help of Public Radio Exchange, an online marketplace for distribution, review and licensing of public radio programming. They discussed three major advantages to using it:

1. It enables anyone, anywhere, to add archival records and safeguard media privately on Pop Up Archive servers or publicly at the Internet Archive – a nonprofit that offers permanent access to collections that exist in digital format for researchers, historians, the general public and more;
2. It makes it easy to add metadata (data that describes and provides information about other data sets), by using speech-to-text technology to create useful subject tags about audio content automatically. Users will also be able to add custom metadata using a simple form or by importing existing CSV or XML records;
3.  It allows anyone to search, filter and access a database of materials, from oral history archives, to media stations and individuals.

Previous to this week’s launch, a beta version of the project was built around the needs of The Kitchen Sisters, Peabody award-winning journalists and independent producers who have collected stories of people’s lives for more than 30 years. Using this example, Smith highlighted that the project was built on the fundamental belief that “everyone who produces content has some sort of archival responsibility for their material…and [it] is a public trust owed to the people interviewed to take care of it.” She also stressed the risk of losing these creative archives pointing to recent Library of Congress research, which  showed that digital records are more likely to be at risk than analog materials. Pop Up Archive is designed to address both the risks and the challenges facing the collection and preservation of digital audio. These include broader issues like lack of organization, as well as a shortage of resources and trained experts who know how to properly archive content. It is also designed to respond to rapidly changing technology. Although existing tools, like Dropbox, may aggregate content, they are limited because don’t provide you with a context or transcribe it for you. There’s also no guarantee that file formats will stay consistent in coming years, so archiving and retaining content becomes even more important for producers. To avoid such issues, Smith and Wootton provided some tips to those interested in starting an archiving project. First, determine what you are organizing; for example, are working with finished audio pieces or works in progress. It also helps to know why you’re organizing it – is it for yourself personally, are you doing it because you work in a team and other members need access to your content, or are you simply helping out a friend. For those interested in archiving content, they also suggested that steps must be taken to figure out how much audio content is being organized, and what the priorities are. For example, are you archiving current content, or do you want to prioritize past content. By better organizing content, not only will it be easier to find in the future, it will create new opportunities to foster collaboration and reuse content, Wootton said. To stay up-to-date on the project’s upcoming software releases, archival trainings and other news, follow @popuparchive and its stream on SoundCloud. You can also e-mail [email protected] or [email protected]. By Elizabeth R. Miller, communications associate at Knight Foundation 

Related Link: “Six ventures bring data to the public as winners of Knight News Challenge”