Special Collections Highlight: Baltimore Voices Company

Today we are highlighting a collection from the Library’s Special Collections Department (offices and Research Room can be found on the 4th Floor of the Learning Commons): the Baltimore Voices Company Collection. 

Formed in 1979, the Baltimore Voices Company (BVC) was the Baltimore Theatre Project's contribution to a larger, multi-faceted local history initiative known as the Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project (or BNHP, another archival collection held here at Langsdale Library). In order to create a theatrical production that was performed throughout the city in 1980, company members utilized existing BNHP oral histories and conducted their own tape-recorded interviews. The BVC's interviews were organized around specific themes, including labor, education, and community organizing. The collection at Langsdale contains oral history tapes, transcripts of interviews, biographical sketches, financial documents, publications, posters, photographs, brochures and more. For digital copies of some of the audio and documents, please see the digital exhibit.

<<Siobhan Hagan, AV Archivist

Recording History

The majority of my job is taking recorded history and preserving it and making it available for all to use. But more and more I feel a responsibility to get more involved in the recording of history via audiovisual means to ensure accessibility, and frankly to make less work for the archivists of the future (trust me, there will still be plenty of things to do). UBalt and Langsdale Library have been doing this together for quite some time in their creation and collection of oral histories. An oral history is "a method of gathering, preserving, and interpreting the voices and memories of people, communities, and participants in past events" as it is defined by the Oral History Association. 

Eleven oral history collections are housed in the Langsdale Library Special Collections Department--six of which were organized and recorded by UBalt students and faculty. In addition to recorded interviews, the oral history collections sometimes include typewritten transcriptions, biographical summaries of interviewees, interview time tables, and photographs donated by interviewees. All of these document Baltimore City communities and organizations and many can be accessed online.

You have an amazing capacity for recording history literally in your pocket: your mobile smart phone. Much recent attention has been brought to utilizing your smart phone as a tool for citizen journalism with the documentation of events following the shooting and death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. To take that one step further: not only can a citizen with a smart phone become a journalist, but they can also be a historical documentarian and archivist at the same time. As is described by the group Activist Archivists, "Media is used to inform and inspire people to action, record the history of social movements and positive change, document abuses of power, and enables the eyes of the world to help protect activists on the ground." This group worked in collaboration with Witness, an international organization that trains and supports people using video in their fight for human rights, to create seven tips for making your videos discoverable and usable in the long term.

Check out those tips and contact me if you would like more information on this topic at shagan@ubalt.edu. And one tip from an Audiovisual Archivist: try to remember to flip your phone to the "widescreen", horizontal position--you will capture more visual information that way and it will look a lot better on the Internet. Take for example this recent cell phone video of new University of Baltimore President Kurt Schmoke and students Michelle Richardson, Nyshe Green and Jasmine Gibson's #IceBucketChallenge.

Post by University of Baltimore.

 

Happy documenting!

<<Siobhan Hagan, Audiovisual Archivist

Partnering with the Internet Archive

The Langsdale Library would like to officially introduce its newest Internet Archive presence. As is stated in its mission, the non-profit Internet Archive “is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, the print disabled, and the general public.”

In particular, Langsdale will be posting audiovisual content from its Special Collections Department (Level 4 of the library—please come visit!). The mission of the Internet Archive and Langsdale Library’s Special Collections Department matches up quite nicely, as the Department “collects, preserves, and provides access to archival, printed, and digital resources that support the research and instructional needs of students, faculty, scholars, and the general public.”

Along with oral histories, we are posting audiovisual content of Baltimore, Maryland-regional television-news footage and special programs from WMAR-TV (Channel 2) and WJZ-TV (Channel 13), ranging in date from 1948 to the year 2000. This footage is FREE to download and non-commercially re-mix and re-use in any way the world wants (as long as the world properly gives us a credit line* in their work). The Internet Archive has allowed Langsdale Library to do this by providing us with free and unlimited digital storage, for which we are extremely grateful. Having a large amount of storage is imperative for the much-larger-than-your-average-JPEG digital-video files (which you will encounter if you download one)—and we have hours of these treasures!

In addition to the Internet Archive site, we now have a presence on the social media site Tumblr, where we are posting shorter and more topical audiovisual highlights each and every week.

If you would like to use parts of our footage in a commercial endeavor or would like to find out more about what we have in our WMAR-TV and WJZ-TV Collections, please give our new Audiovisual Archivist, Siobhan (shi-VON) Hagan, a call at 410.837.4268, or email at shagan@ubalt.edu. Although certainly not required, if you re-purpose our footage, we would love it if you would please share your work with us as well!


*Credit line: Courtesy of the WMAR-TV and WJZ-TV Collections, University of Baltimore