Eighty years of literary audio archives at the Library of Congress: Preserving collections from the physical to digital

Abstract

This paper reviews the 80-year history of two Library of Congress literary audio archives — the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature and the PALABRA Archive — and details the challenges and opportunities that the dawn of the digital era posed for such collections. Curators and archival professionals who had been accustomed to analogue collection frameworks and workflows began to develop strategies for digitisation and digital access, paving the way for the establishment of the Library’s Digital Content Management Section. This new section’s Digital Collections Management Compendium outlines the institution’s policy and guidance for its digital content managers. New complexities with handling digital files highlighted the need to develop innovative digital processing workflows, as well as the importance of documenting these workflows and techniques for future processing efforts. Continuous documentation and efforts to process digital files have led to increased confidence in utilising scripting for batch processing as well as an improved understanding of the requirements for making this content accessible. The collaboration between literary audio archives curators and digital content managers laid the foundation for similar digital preservation practices that the institution continues to build upon for other projects, and continues to ensure the successful transition of these historic literary collections into the digital era.