It has been a busy time for Paradisec over the last couple of months. We now have more than 5,100 hours of recorded material in the catalog and in 2 months alone have added 250GB of data, all of it representing digitised versions of analog tapes.
Recent work on the collection of 200 tapes from the Solomon Islands Museum is nearing completion but, as some tapes have required careful conservation work before being playable, the project has taken longer than expected. The collection was in urgent need of digitisation, not only because of the condition of the tapes, but also because little is known about the contents of the tapes. At least some contain material in Ririo – a language that has only a very small number of living speakers. The availability of digital files will allow the Museum to identify the contents of the recordings. We have also just finished digitising Nancy Carter’s 1960s recordings from the Solomon Islands and Bougainville that came to us two years ago. These three inch tapes were initially unplayable and needed special attention. They are now available online.
Linda Barwick has submitted a series of Italian dialect questionnaires and recordings (LB3) collected from speakers in Australia of southern Marchigiano dialects from the province of Ascoli Piceno (communes of Appignano del Tronto and Castel di Lama) as part of her honours project in 1980.
We have digitised Barry Blake’s Pitta Pitta recordings (BB2) which have been added to the archive. Editing of Ian Green’s notebooks and field recordings of Daly River languages continues prior to being made available. We are preparing Alan Walker’s recordings from Timor in the 1960s and 1970s, repairing his cassettes prior to digitisation.
We have redeveloped our catalog, NABU, with new functions which include: allowing depositors to create reports of activity in their collection; implementing a viewer for images and media; and we are currently transcoding the whole collection to provide HTML5 streaming accessibility on a range of devices.
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