This is the space where I digitize audio cassettes, reel-to-reels, records, and even CDs into mp3 and wav files. I know, it looks messy, but I have a system! I am currently the only staff member working with audio formats.

I recently attended an amazing summit on archiving audio and video history collections. The speaker, Doug Boyd (you can follow him on Twitter, if you’d like), runs the Louie B. Nunn Center at the University of Kentucky.ⁱ

I, along with the rest of the attendees, listened with rapt attention as Boyd discussed the widespread implications of keeping and using these collections. Some of it was very technical, and some of it very poetic, in a way. As the time went on, his talk and discussion afterward helped me realize the depth of something I already believed: audio and video collections are a different breed of history.

Of course, objects and documents can be studied for information. (Danielle Stuckle, Outreach Coordinator, discussed how these historical items can be disseminated into information in her first blog post here). However, audio and video collections are best consumed in the form they are given to grant us the full impact of their importance and meaning.

Lindsay Schott, Archives Specialist, does the majority of work with film footage.  This is the space Lindsay uses to digitize video.

For example—if you see an old cassette tape, you can examine it as an object…but it won’t tell you what is on it. *If* there is an accompanying transcript—and let’s just say that it is actually typed without error or sounds cut out, which is not always the case—you can glean different information from that. But if you listen to that old cassette, you will learn so much more. You can hear the accents of the people talking; you can consider the way questions are asked; if you hear noise in the background, you can think about what is going on if the interviewer is distracted; and you can intuit more meaning, even in where the speaker is hesitant, and where he or she is fast to answer.

Here is another example. This screenshot shows a partial transcript of an interview that I conducted with ND Vietnam veteran Paul Good Iron.ⁱⁱ

Now, here is the audio.

“Um” can take on more meaning when you hear it than when you read it. Even knowing that a speaker said it at all can change the impact of the story. The spoken word doesn’t really make for clean reading after all.

The challenge with these collections is that it is often easier and faster for researchers to read through a transcript than it is to listen to the audio. Once we have a transcript, it is easily digitized, and can be sent around the world—and researchers using it can search the text by word or read through it at their leisure. That is one of our goals, after all, as you avid readers may recall from my first blog post.

However, I invite you to consider these facts:

• Transcripts can be expensive. It takes a bit of money and a lot of time to get interviews transcribed, and that is not always possible—especially as collections grow.
• Transcripts are not always completely accurate. Have you ever read a transcript and noticed a name misspelled, a word changed, or some other error? Heck, have you ever tried to transcribe something spoken in a thick accent? Possibly where the interviewee lapses into a language that is familiar to them, but foreign to you? Yeah.
• Transcripts are often “cleaned up.” People don’t like to publish all of those uhs and ums and random swearing that may occur. Like it or not, there can be a loss of some authenticity.
• 

  SHSND 0003-184: Mrs. Ted (Ellen Roberts) Pope, pumping water in Slope County.

  Audio and video collections are often a primary source, and transcripts are a secondary source. Let me describe this picture for you. There is a woman with her back turned to the camera, pumping water from a well. She is looking over her shoulder. She is wearing a long dress. The vast prairie stretches out in front of her. It’s very windy. Do you want to take my words as a primary source? What did I miss? Granted, having some information on the photo helps, but what feelings can I invoke with words that can’t be seen through the image? That concept holds true with audio and video.
• There is no easy way to get a good transcript. There is no easy software you can download, no quick way to drop a file somewhere and pull the audio from it.

Oh, the ubiquitous cassette. This is what makes up the majority of our oral history collection.

Yes, it is nice to have those transcripts. They are very useful. But in the end, would you rather read a biography about your great-grandfather (written by him or not), or would you rather hear his voice, speaking about the hardships he went through in settling the land he later would own?

It’s definitely a point for discussion, and each repository must make its own choices. But hopefully, that primary source of raw video and raw audio will find a prime spot on your shelf.

ⁱ The Louie B. Nunn Center has a phenomenal setup, with multiple ongoing projects, and a small team taking in and processing more audio and video collections in a year than some repositories currently have in their collection. As a point of comparison, we do have several expansive audio and video projects and multiple smaller collections in our Archives.

ⁱⁱ As a side note, transcribing this section (two minutes) took me half an hour. Or maybe it just felt that way.

Not long ago, I listened to a woman describe how she ended up with a school bell in her yard from Sanish, a town that vanished beneath the waters of the Garrison Dam in the 1950s. I listened as a woman described how she and her twin, born prematurely in the 1920s, flourished because of a doctor who put them in a cigar box in the stove to incubate. One man described what it was like to see Earth from space. Another man, in the National Guard, described the feeling of dead weight he would always remember from carrying a fallen comrade in Afghanistan, while yet another man told me about flying helicopters in Vietnam.

Although we do not have one position here designated for doing so, as time allows, I conduct and collect oral histories to be stored in the archives. It’s truly a privilege. These stories, all from people connected to North Dakota in one way or another, are often very personal histories. They are sharing these stories—some good, some bad—with a stranger, and with future generations. At first when I meet with them, they are hesitant, often nervous, and often unsure of what to expect. By the end, we are friends, even family.

This photo, of the Nitschke family in front of a sod house in the Jud area, was donated as part of one of our major oral history collections from the 1970s. This image accompanied the oral interview from Mrs. Sibyl Hall, of Edgeley. (SHSND 0032-LM-15-63)

Everybody’s history, whether they played a big or a small role, has somehow affected someone, some place, some thing around them. We do have interviews with politicians, singers, actors, and writers, among others. However, the bulk of our oral history collections consist of the voices of settlers who built up this state, and the veterans who fought for it. This covers a great expanse o f time and very many formats. We have wax cylinders and records alongside cassettes, videos, reel-to-reels, CDs and DVDs. Some of these interviews were conducted by people like me, who worked for or through the State Historical Society, and some were by people who thought it would be interesting, were doing research for a project or paper, or who were relatives. Basically, anyone can conduct an interview…so here are a few things to keep in mind, if you decide to do one of your own!

Focus
It’s not about you. Your interviewee is the focus of your recording, and should be the primary speaker. Give them time to collect their thoughts and encourage them to speak freely and openly. Help them to orient themselves in their memories, but do your best not to color their memories with your own experiences.

Atmosphere
While you can’t control all elements of an interview, you can take precautions. You want to find a quiet place so you don’t pick up the background noises. On the flip side, make sure you’re both still comfortable.

Time
Interviews take some time. You may need to come back, or try again. It’s okay. You don’t want to exhaust yourself or your interviewee, or you won’t be able to collect the data you are hoping for. Plan on some visiting before and after (to set the interviewee at ease, and perhaps explain things).

Equipment
You will want to consider the type of equipment you will use. Remember that two microphones are better than one. If you only have one, place that one nearer to the interviewee. You want to actually be able to hear them.

Another major collection we maintain consists of a variety of formats for different veterans: audio, video, photos, scrapbooks, manuscripts, and biographies. This image is of LeRoy “Nick” Nichols (far left), out of Dickinson; we have 8 mm film and multiple images from his time in the Air Force during WWII. (SHSND 10873-0176-12)

Preparation
You can’t prepare for everything, but you want to try. What do you want to know? You can prep as many questions as you’d like, and may still go off track, but will have a base to return to. How will the interview be used? After it’s complete, where will it go? Do you want to donate it to a historical society? You may need to have the interviewee sign permission or release forms.

Have fun!
Overall, have fun! Interviews are a great way to connect to people, and you are saving their memory for the future. Don’t stress the little stuff; do your best, and the rest will fall into place.

I conducted a quick, unplanned interview with one of our longtime volunteers, Lillian Wilson, who is a war bride from England. She allowed me to tape and post part of our brief conversation. Since it was specifically for this, it is edited slightly for this format and posting, although that is not something I do with my interviews. You can see the equipment I like to use—a standalone mic (which is multidirectional, by the way), and a digital audio recorder. Note that I still place the mic in front of her! Listen to the interview!

When I started working at the State Historical Society (as an intern in the summer of 2006; two years later, I became fulltime staff), I had been in the building before, but not behind the scenes. I received a whirlwind tour just a few weeks prior to being hired. It seemed like a huge maze. So the night before I started, I had this dream in which I wandered the underbelly of the Historical Society for days, coming across various “camps” (I can only assume this referred to our different divisions, like Archaeology and Historic Preservation, the Museum, and of course the Archives, where I was headed), where people were dressed in late 1800-style period clothing, living off the land, lighting camp fires, singing old songs to the stars above….

Needless to say, it’s not really like that here, although I have no problem donning vintage costumes (and at various times, I have). For a facility dealing with the historic, we stay relatively modern. In fact, the Archives gained its portion of our present expansion in 2007. (FYI—the term “Archives” can be both singular and plural. This post relates to the Archives as a location, and as it is one location, I will be using it in the singular form). We mainly received more elbow room, gaining a meeting area, office spaces and doubling the storage capacity…though we also increased the size of our public research area, the Orin G. Libby Memorial Reading Room, by the amount of one cozy nook.

This is the size of our cozy nook. It is named after Gerald Newborg, who was the State Archivist at the time. We planned to put some displays in here; right now, we have images from the Myron H. Bright Manuscript Collection (MSS 11075) up on the walls. This collection includes political ephemera and photographs. You can read more about the collection here on our website.

Two of my coworkers and I work in the Reading Room in shifts, assisting patrons with their research in person and through email, phone and regular mail. I also work with our audio collections, conduct oral history interviews, and do other tasks as assigned—such as giving tours of the Archives.

Whenever groups visit, I like to ask if anyone knows what an Archives is. Typically, very few hands go up in the air. A hesitant answer is given—“I think you have books?”

Yes, we have books. And journals, periodicals…

Head of Technical Services Rachel White reported the Archives recently accessioned its 100,000th book into the collections. We also have approximately 1800 different titles of periodicals. A selection of these books can be found in our Reading Room, but most of them are stored in the temperature-controlled stacks area.

Photographs, maps, audio and video footage…

Archives Specialist Lindsay Schott is cleaning some film that she is working with in her office. The audio and video collections are selectively digitized as staff time permits. They, plus the photo collections and microfilm masters, are stored in a temperature-controlled area. The freezer located in this space does not hold ice cream, unfortunately, but does a good job of stopping deterioration of film that is in pretty bad shape. We keep acetate and nitrate films and photo negatives in the freezer.

Not to mention the loads upon loads of manuscript collections, local government records, state government records…

Our collections are stored in the stacks area. We have over 100 rows of compact shelves which roll back and forth, allowing us to store more collections in a smaller space. Collections that are stored on the higher shelves have to be retrieved through use of a ladder if you are of average size or shorter, such as I am. You can see different sizes of boxes here; we fit the box to the collection. If we need to add to it, we are always able to do so.

Did I forget newspapers?

We receive daily and weekly newspapers from each county around the state. We store them until we have enough to put on a roll of microfilm. Newspapers are essentially acidic, so we microfilm them to preserve them. You can learn more about that here.

You get the drift.

Here in the Archives, we strive to collect and protect these types of “flat” materials. We’re sort of like a paper museum. Not a museum made out of paper—that could get messy. Especially during a spring thaw! But just like a museum, we collect, store, and provide access to items that document the past. We try to give our objects the longest, happiest life possible. We keep them cool and dry, in a darkened environment. We house them in boxes, folders and sleeves. And then we try to make them as accessible as possible.

Of course, everything at the State Historical Society of North Dakota relates directly to North Dakota, Dakota Territory, and the Northern Great Plains, so you probably won’t see your cousin’s step-father’s friend-from-Oklahoma’s family pedigree chart here. However, you can listen to Francis Densmore’s recordings of Arikara, Hidatsa, and Mandan; you can view a newspaper from Grafton, North Dakota, from 1882 (on microfilm); you can search through scanned images of North Dakota’s past.

Once you overcome the maze, you start to learn how much there is to discover. You will see the “secrets” each division holds—the keys to our past, present, and future.