Staff members in ETSU’s Archives of Appalachia are preserving one-of-a-kind audio and video collections that document the history of Appalachia.
“The collections represent an intellectual and social history of the region,” said Amy Barnum, the project archivist who was hired for the two-year project in October 2000. “They provide a rich base for people to draw on.”
The collections will be valuable to scholars around the globe, students and the media.
The preservation work being done by Barnum, the archive’s staff and others, including Mike Strickland from WETS-FM, is being funded through a grant of $96,818 awarded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.
Upon consultant recommendation, staff members chose to preserve the Broadside Television, Bernard Rousseau and Barnicle-Cadle collections which include performances by and interviews with musical pioneers, discussions of Appalachian social and labor issues, storytelling performances, traditional craft demonstrations and cultural events.
These collections were chosen because of the significance of their contents and the risk of further deterioration due to the age of the recordings.
As stated in the project-related Web site, “To Tell the Story of a Region,” Broadside Television, in conjunction with ETSU, produced the Southern Appalachian Ethnography Series in the 1970s.
This series includes interviews with and performances by bluegrass musicians Doc Watson and Ralph Stanley, discussions of social and labor issues and interviews with community activists. The series represents one of the early efforts by folklorists to use video in field research.
The audio tapes in the Bernard Rousseau Collection date from 1957-1982. These tapes feature many of the pioneers of country and bluegrass music in performances throughout Appalachia.
The Barnicle-Cadle Collec-tion is composed of recorded music and interviews recorded from the 1930s through the mid-1950s by Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, a folklorist and teacher, and her husband Tillman Cadle, a coal miner and union organizer.
These recordings feature African-American storytellers and singers, performances by such well-known singers and musicians as Brownie McGhee and Leadbelly, and spirituals, coal-mining songs and ballads recorded in Tennessee and Kentucky.
The two-year preservation project is due to be completed in the summer of 2002. Upon completion, the original collections will have been cleaned and preserved, public-use copies of the materials will have been created and catalogued descriptions of the contents of these collections will be available through the Internet and a procedural manual will have been created for use in future preservation projects, Barnum said.
Preservation copies will be created in an analog format and stored in the archives’ temperature controlled storage areas.
Barnum said the quality of some of the original documents has already improved since being stored in these temperature-controlled rooms.
Consultants Bruce Nemerov and John Lynch were called in to train Barnum, Strickland and Roy Andrade, a graduate assistant, to properly handle, clean and duplicate the collections.
Barnum said it was a pleasure to work with people of different backgrounds whom are all dedicated to the project and recognize what a “gold mine” these collections represent.
An unexpected frustration was the need to find older equipment that was needed to facilitate the playing and re-recording of the collections, she said.
“There has been a lot of serendipity here in terms of getting out there and finding what we needed and making it work,” Barnum said.
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