In 2024, I initiated the “ENB Digitisation and Preservation Project” aiming to collect old analogue tape recordings from my community in East New Britain in Papua New Guinea. As a staff member at PARADISEC, community members were approaching me to let me know they had recordings of church choir songs, gospel songs, choral music, string bands, cultural performances and ceremonies, storytelling of customs and kinship and clan stories of the past. I also thought there could be more recordings out there as well. The project objective was to collect these analogue cassettes, digitise and safeguard them and make them accessible for future generations.
I am a Tolai Gunantuna man from ENB, based in Sydney. I have worked in the Sydney office of PARADISEC since 2018 and as part of my role, I have supported finding, preserving and improving metadata of heritage recordings from across the Pacific, and through outreach programs, making these findable and accessible back to the communities. I felt it was time to act and focus on my own people in villages and community areas of East New Britain and I knew as an archivist that I was in a good position to do this.
I knew that over the decades in ENB, audio recordings of music made privately or by studios, were often kept by individuals in their homes, which were not the best for long term storage due to the climate and the conditions. Furthermore, as the global archival community is aware, magnetic tape is deteriorating fast and becoming obsolete. People could no longer listen to them because there were no functioning tape players around. This community collection project was undertaken because time is running out and we might lose these legacy recordings that are a valuable reminder and record of our past and a resource for the future.
The project has three stages: firstly the collection of materials in ENB; secondly the digitisation and cataloging at PARADISEC in Sydney; thirdly return of the materials to the community and educating the community about the online PARADISEC catalog. This blog post is about stage 1.
ENB Digitisation and Preservation Project Stage 1: Collection and Training in East New Britain (May-July 2024)
The first stage involved recruiting and training the project team on the ground in ENB, advertising the project and setting up collection locations, collecting the tapes and metadata, sorting and organising the tapes and safely transporting to Sydney. We collected over 600 tapes, of which 153 were finalised and brought to Sydney.
Because this project was the first of its kind in our community, it was important to recruit a good team and train them in the basics of archiving and management of data. The team members were recruited through my professional and cultural networks from the Kokopo, Toma and North Coast areas of ENB. Apart from me, none of them had archival experience so the project also built their skills and capacity.
On 20th May 2024, a training day was facilitated by Project Coordinator, Colleen Darby. The twelve member project team gathered at Bitaiting section of Vunamami Village near Kokopo to meet with me on a video conference call from Sydney.
I started the training day by outlining the objectives and expected outcomes of the project and introduced some basic aspects of archiving and cataloging practice, such as metadata management, file types and consent and permissions. We explained the PARADISEC catalog naming system so the team would be able to correctly name the tapes on site and collect relevant metadata. On this day we also explained to the team members their rates of pay, work conditions and schedules, as well as their roles and responsibilities. Colleen took the the lead in teaching the importance of customer service, including presentation and conveying the correct information to our contributors. Afterwards Colleen and I reviewed the day and we were happy with how it went.
Promotion and Publicity
The promotional and publicity campaign for advertising the project was undertaken during April and May 2024 to drive the awareness across the communities so people knew what we were looking for and when and where they could bring their tapes. We had a banner displayed at the Kokopo market, project flyers distributed at the market and in the different villages and a radio broadcast on local radio station RENB.
Project Implementation
We started the collection weekly at the Kokopo Market, the biggest market in the area. We set up a stall and people could bring their tapes. The team members would collect the tapes, enter the details such as names, village, type of material and entered this information in a written register and then bagged the tapes per collector. There were appreciation payments made to each contributor, and the team provided receipts to keep a record for the safe return of the analogue tapes and the digitised materials.
As well as the markets, the team travelled to three villages (Viviran, Vunairoto, Vunamami) for community outreach, connecting with local people.
You can see from these photos the engagement of the team members and the community in this project. My connection as a Tolai from this area resonated with people and they trusted and were excited by the project. In the photo of Viviran Village, for example, you can see my old school friends contributing tapes, and my family members such as my sister Jenny and brother Nelson working with Colleen the coordinator registering and collecting materials. I am so looking forward to returning the digitised recordings and showing everyone the collection in the PARADISEC archive. For the first time, people in my homeland have learnt about archiving, what it is and why it is important. It’s been fulfilling and satisfying to share my passion for archiving with my people.
After collecting 600 tapes, the team filtered the tapes by condition and removing unknown tapes without permissions, those in unuseable condition and any doubles. They were also checked using Youtube to see if they were already digitised which is quite common in the area. The Project Coordinator arranged that deposit forms were signed for consent by the owners.
Reflections and Evaluation by the Project Coordinator, Colleen Darby
Colleen expressed her excitement and commitment to this project by sharing her perspectives about the importance of ENB music traditions to be safeguarded and sharing her own connection to some of the recordings. I acknowledge her contribution to the project and value her hard work and local knowledge which made this all possible.
Colleen grew up as a daughter of a Methodist church pastor and her grandfather was the first ordained Indigenous Reverend Minister of the Methodist Church from her home village Vunamami, from 1953 to 1963 when he retired. Her childhood was filled with songs in Kuanua and English languages. The Methodist forefathers also compiled the Kuanua Hymn Book called “Buk Na Kakailai”, which holds songs composed and translated into the Kuanua language by our own people after the arrival of the Methodist missionaries to the New Guinea Islands region from England, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. She found the recordings of this type of music on the collected tapes to be relevant to her own experiences.
In her evaluation report, Colleen commented on the positive benefit of collecting old cassette tapes so that the contributors can enjoy in digital format their favourite hymnals and songs, which they have not heard for decades, at their own leisure. She is proud of her involvement in this important project of digitisating and preserving of choral music, hymnals and songs and music from East New Britain Province, PNG into international archives. In conclusion, Colleen evaluated the outcomes as a great success, with all tapes in good condition with all necessary information collated and labelled. She acknowledged the teams in fulfilling the project’s goals. This was a first-of-its-kind project in her experience, because she had never worked with archives and collections. It was also unusual and unconventional for a research project like this to not have a outsider researcher, but be initiated by a local Tolai as the project lead. She thanked me for this opportunity to be part of the archival world.
Overall this project has been a great success and I look forward to sharing Stage 2 Digitisation in a future post.
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