[PADG:1033] LC National Digital Library Program announces "Florida Folklife from the WPA collections"

[Tamara Swora-Gober <tswo@xxxxxxx>]

This message is being widely posted

The Library of Congress National Digital Library Program and the
American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress announce the release
of the collection:

?Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections?.at:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/flwpahtml/

The online presentation provides access to 376 sound recordings made in
Florida in 1939-40 under the auspices of several government-funded arts
projects.  Using recording equipment loaned by the Archive of American
Folk Song (now the American Folklife Center) at the Library of Congress,
the WPA staff documented folktales, life histories, and sacred and
secular music of cultures and communities throughout Florida.  The
recordings are augmented by 106 accompanying materials, including
recording logs, song text transcriptions, correspondence between Florida
WPA workers and Library of Congress personnel from 1937 to 1942, and an
essay on Florida folklife by Zora Neale Hurston.  The online
presentation of these rich historic materials is made possible by the
generous support of The Texaco Foundation.

WPA staff traveled throughout twelve Florida counties with the Library's
recording equipment in tow, collecting blues and work songs from
menhaden fishing boats, railroad gangs, and turpentine camps; and
children's songs, dance music, and religious music from schools, homes,
and churches.  They often interviewed the performers, documenting their
lives as well as their folksongs. Links are provided from the Florida
WPA collection to the American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the
Federal Writers? Project, 1936-1940 collection?already available through
the Library of Congress American Memory Web site?when a performer?s life
has been documented in writing as well as on acetate disk.

Florida writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, an editor for the
Florida Federal Writers' Project from 1938-39, described pockets of rich
cultural material in the state in her essay, "Proposed Recording
Expedition into the Floridas," included with the online presentation. 
Hurston is also showcased as a performer, singing and explaining
folksongs she learned in Florida and the Bahamas.

A new essay by Stetson Kennedy, folklore editor for the Florida Writers?
Project, 1937-42, reflects on the labor and the legacy of the WPA in
Florida. An extensive bibliography, a list of related Web sites, a map
of the state, and a guide to the ethnic and language groups of Florida
add further context to the New Deal era and to Florida culture.

Building the Digital Collection
Digitizing the sound recordings
The sound recordings in Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections, which
were transferred from the original twelve-inch acetate disks to
ten-inch, 7.5 inches-per-second (ips) analog tape reels in the 1960s,
were transferred from the reels to digital audio tape (DAT) to produce a
master source for digitization.  The Motion Picture, Broadcasting and
Recorded Sound Division Laboratory of the Library of Congress made the
transfers from the preservation tapes rather than the original disks
because of the high level of surface noise on the disks.

WaveForm (.wav), MPEG 2, Layer 3 (.mp3), and RealAudio (.ra) versions
have been supplied for each recording.  The Wave files were created from
the DAT tape at a sampling rate of 22,050 Hz per second, 16-bit word
length, and a single (mono) channel. The RealAudio files were derived
from the Wave files through digital processing and were created for
users who have at least a 14.4 modem (8-bit).  The MP3 files were
derived from the Wave files in a batch-conversion process using the MP3
plug-in of Sonic Foundry's SoundForge software.

Surface noise will be apparent on the recordings, and tracks may start
or end abruptly, as on the original recordings. Minimal adjustments were
made to certain tracks, including the deletion of some inaudible
snippets of conversation and the removal of as many pops and clicks as
possible without further distorting the audio.

Digitizing the photographic prints
Ivy Bigbee of Ivy Bigbee Photography, Jacksonville, Florida, produced
the digital images illustrating Stetson Kennedy's essay, "A Florida Treasure
Hunt," and his biography.

Digitizing the manuscripts
Manuscript materials were scanned on site by the National Digital
Library Program paper scanning and text conversion contractor, Systems
Integration Group of Lanham, Maryland. UMAX flatbed scanners were used
to digitize most of the manuscripts.

Typescript materials were converted to machine-readable form at an
accuracy rate of 99.95 percent and encoded with Standard Generalized
Markup Language (SGML), according to the American Memory Document Type
Definition (DTD).  This DTD is a markup scheme that conforms to the
guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), the work of a
consortium of scholarly institutions.  The texts of the transcripts have
been translated to Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) for indexing and
viewing on the World Wide Web.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/flwpahtml/

**********
This collection is the tenth collection from the American Folklife
Center to be added to the American Memory Web site at: 

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ammemhome.html

Please direct any questions to ndlpcoll@xxxxxxxx