Historical Voices

A testbed dedicated to spoken word recordings, will continue to provide research challenges in audio sampling and digital preservation, searching and sorting within linear media, and descriptive metadata schemas. New research corpora will include recordings of individuals of broad social importance, such as scientists, artists, reformers, writers, musicians, athletes, performers, and religious leaders, recorded in lecture environments, media interviews, oral histories, and church sermons. As digital library research corpora, these recordings stored in local, regional, and university archives provide new sampling and preservation challenges and new descriptive requirements for fruitful use by a wide range of scholars. Once the recordings are available, they will expand the body of materials to test sampling and user driven sorting to reduce the search for relevance, as well as provide rich new resources for humanities teaching, research and learning.