Maine Perspective Front Page
Folklife Center Awarded NEH Preservation Grant
The Maine Folklife Center has won its first-ever preservation grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The $99,500 award is critical to protecting the more than 3,000 hours of recorded interviews that form the heart of the nationally recognized Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History.
"We're trying to extend the lives of these valuable tape recordings. The only way to do that is to transfer them to a fresh medium," says Stephen Green, the Center's archivist, who will oversee the transfer of some of the oldest and most vulnerable recordings to new master tapes.
"We're trying to be very faithful to the original sound," he says. "It's important that these recordings remain accessible to the community and to researchers."
Stored in South Stevens Hall and in a climate-controlled area in Fogler Library are interviews that Center Director Edward "Sandy" Ives and other staff have conducted with loggers, farmers, fishermen, nurses, teachers, homemakers and professionals. They tell the stories of the ordinary people who have formed the backbone of Maine and the Maritime provinces during the past century.
Archivists consider most audio tapes endangered if they are more than 20 years old; the Center's oldest recordings date from its founding in 1958.
The NEH grant will allow the Center to purchase professional-quality equipment needed to make preservation master copies of the recordings most in danger of deterioration. The funds also will enable the Center to reproduce some of the more valuable interviews on compact disc, enabling teachers to use them in the classroom for the first time. The new equipment is expected to be in place by the end of June.
A graduate assistant and a part-time preservation technician hired with a portion of the grant will undertake the time-consuming tape transfers during the next two years.
If some of the recordings were to deteriorate beyond restoration, Ives says, "You would lose hundreds of voices of people who made history without ever having their names emblazoned across the top of a newspaper - ordinary people."
The purchase of new equipment has been a major goal for the Center in recent years. Much of the Center's existing equipment was purchased in the early 1970s.
When the project is completed, the Center will have a collection of recordings and photographs that is as accessible to the public as ever, allowing teachers, scholars, journalists and other researchers to continue to hear the history of Maine and the Maritimes as told by the people who have lived it.