Michigan State U. Plans On-Line Collection of Historical Audio Recordings

Michigan State University plans to build the largest collection of historical audio recordings on the Internet, opening 50,000 hours of interviews and speeches to researchers, students, and anyone interested in the intonations, pauses, and coughs of history.

On Wednesday, the National Science Foundation announced a $3.6-million grant to the university to build the National Gallery of the Spoken Word. The on-line gallery will offer a broad range of material, including the first cylinder recordings by Thomas Edison, the voices of Babe Ruth and Florence Nightingale, and interviews by Studs Terkel.

The five-year grant will also support research into new ways to search audio recordings, so that scholars can skip right to the sound clips they need.

"One of the problems now with a sound file is, How do you know how much to listen to to find which part you want?" says Mark Lawrence Kornbluh, the principal investigator for the project. "The ability to search the actual sound files is really important if sound files are going to be used for teaching and research."

Mr. Kornbluh is also director of the university's MATRIX Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences and executive director of H-Net, a series of on-line discussion lists for humanities scholars.

Michigan State will work with universities and institutions that are already building digital sound libraries, including Northwestern University, the Chicago Historical Society, and the University of Colorado.

The project will also work with the Library of Congress and other institutions to help develop standards for archiving audio recordings or, as Mr. Kornbluh puts it, "the librarianship of sound."

The site is just a skeleton so far, but project organizers hope to have a first batch of material -- focusing on American history -- available within nine months or a year.

The grant is part of the science foundation's Digital Libraries Initiative program.