Offline static collections

Following the earlier discussion of creating collections for offline delivery (particularly on Raspberry Pi), we now have a simple method that indexes a set of items from the PARADISEC collection and generates an html view, which means that files are not disconnected from the catalog in the way they were in the past. To do … Read more

Splicing, cracking, rehousing: Preparing cassettes for digitisation

Some cassette collections we receive for digitisation are in good shape and digitisation is a relatively smooth process. Often though, this is not the case. Some collections we are currently receiving were recorded over 50 years ago, have often been sitting for years in less than ideal conditions for maintaining their quality, e.g. high humidity, … Read more

The Insider Archivist: Collecting Music Recordings from East New Britain (ENB)

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 … Read more

The Tape Restorator

We wrote about dried out cassette tapes in an earlier blog post, and the problem they create for playback, screeching as they try to move through the playback machine’s mechanism and ultimately failing to play. You can hear an audio example in that post. To get the tapes into a playable form, they need to … Read more

Using Raspberry Pi in Ranongga

By guest blogger Debra McDougall I thought I’d write a short update to Nick’s post on 21 January 2024 about using the Raspberry Pi to return legacy recordings to people in Ranongga, Solomon Islands. These recordings were digitised in 2019-2020 with the support of an ELDP Legacy Materials Grant (0609), a project led by myself and … Read more

Elan file viewer

We were sent a set of Elan files to add to the PARADISEC collection. It is hard to know what is in each Elan file in a large set without opening them to view the contents. We made the Elan file viewer to deal with this issue. You can select a folder of .eaf files … Read more

Grammars from archival records

Congratulations to Katie Bicevskis who presented her PhD completion talk last Friday. The PhD thesis is a grammar of Marri Ngarr, an Indigenous language from the Northern Territory, one of what are known as the Daly languages (https://dalylanguages.org/view_language.php?id=10). It has few speakers today, as most Marri Ngarr people now speak Murrinhpatha as a first language. … Read more