Parting the Metadata Sea: a Migration to Preserve Religious Sound

The American Religious Sounds Project, a joint effort from Michigan State University and Ohio State University, has been gathering sound recordings of American religious life since 2014. The project is undertaking a dual process of expanding to other institutions and ingesting the collection into the Vincent Voice Library at MSU. With thousands of recordings, but scant metadata, it became clear that the collection could not endure this transformation without serious changes: The metadata schemas changed structure as the project evolved. The metadata itself was never updated and lacked vital preservation and administrative information. Files often got lost in the process of writing description and publishing to the web. However, this restructuring provided an opportunity to re-frame this digital humanities collection as an archive, incorporating preservation into existing workflows while streamlining the ingest and review process. We designed a new metadata schema to serve our growing community of stakeholders and built a custom application to streamline the collection and assessment of sound recordings and metadata and export materials to ingest into the Vincent Voice Library. This poster documents innovative techniques for cleaning, crosswalking, and re-constructing metadata as well as the broader process of collaborating across institutions, departments, and disciplines.

Presenter(s): Kate Topham


3:20 PM