NSF has Chosen MSU as Homesite to $3.6 Million Project to Preserve the Spoken Word

EAST LANSING, Mich. - Michigan State University has been chosen by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to lead a $3.6 million project that will revolutionize audiotape repositories across the U.S. The National Gallery of the Spoken Word (NGSW), made possible by a five-year grant from the NSF Digital Library Initiative program, will create a fully searchable digitized database of historical voice recordings that span the 20th century. A collaborative project among the humanities, education, library science and engineering, NGSW will provide the first large broad-based repository of its kind that will be easily accessible via the Internet. The NGSW will bring digitized historical speech across the Internet into living rooms, classrooms, research laboratories, libraries and government offices across the globe. Available to all visitors free of charge, exhibits in the NGSW repository will remain on display permanently since the NGSW faces no space limitations and never needs to rotate items out of the collection. "This project holds tremendous promise for researchers in a wide range of fields," said Mark Kornbluh, director of MATRIX: Center for the Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences, executive director of H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences On-Line and associate professor of history at MSU. "We are developing a targeted range of search mechanisms that will allow users of the NGSW to not only identify key words, concepts and names, but will also enable keyword, topic, speaker and language searches of the sound files themselves." "This grant is a hallmark for MSU," said MSU Provost Lou Anna K. Simon. "It recognizes the efforts within the College of Arts and Letters, supported by Libraries, Computing and Technology units, to be a national leader in assuring that the arts and humanities have a prominent place in the digital age." By delivering the transformative power of language, rhetoric and speech via the Internet, the NGSW has the potential to create a worldwide virtual community. "The American public has demonstrated repeatedly that it will engage in and learn from serious cultural and historical debates if they are made accessible to them. Cultural tourism is booming, for example, and C-SPAN continues to have a devoted group of followers," Kornbluh said. "This NGSW will reach out to all levels of American society, engaging the widest possible range of members of this democracy." FOR MSU NEWS on the Web, go to http://www.msu.edu/unit/univrel/media/ The NGSW will consist of high-quality voice materials from collections from MSU, the University of Colorado, Chicago Historical Society, and Northwestern University. To listen to John F. Kennedy's speech about the Cuban missile crisis or Sir Winston Churchill's "The Sinews of Peace," or for more information about the NGSW, visit http://www.ngsw.org. Attached are additional facts about the NGSW and a listing of the gallery collections.

Facts About the National Gallery of the Spoken Word

The National Gallery of the Spoken Word (NGSW), headquarted at Michigan State University, will preserve and make historically significant voice recordings freely available and easily accessible via the Internet.

The NGSW will create a significant, fully searchable, on-line database of spoken word collections that span the 20th century. NGSW is a collaborative project among the humanities, engineering, education and library science.

By identifying and digitally preserving materials in voice libraries throughout the U.S., the NGSW will provide storage for digital holdings and public exhibit "space" for the more evocative collections.

The NGSW faces no space limitation and never needs to rotate items out of the exhibited collection. All exhibits will remain on display permanently, freely available to all visitors.

The NGSW will provide the opportunity to research the many critical technical problems that remain unsolved when it comes to digitally preserving sound and delivering it via the WWW (analog versions of speech resources suffer from machine noise, copying distortion, background sound and deterioration.)

Participants in this project include researchers who are recognized leaders in the development of aural search capabilities. The project will create search techniques that work for large-scale collections of spoken materials.

The NGSW also will create a repository of high quality digital versions of key spoken material with standard bibliographic and metadata access while developing a set of best practices for future development of sound on the Web, including methods for conversion, preservation, access and copyright compliance.

By bringing the spoken word across the Internet and into living rooms, classrooms, research laboratories, libraries and government offices, this project has the potential to create worldwide virtual communities through the transformative power of language, rhetoric and speech.

The NGSW represents an opportunity for educators to think about education at both K-12 and post-secondary levels in new and exciting ways that make full use of the new information technologies, while maintaining the highest scholarly standards.

This project aims to continue efforts that will bridge communication barriers between teachers and scholars, while facilitating development of classroom tools which empower instructors, provide training, support and models of successful new teaching techniques, and forge new links between scholarly societies, museums and educational institutions.

The NGSW involves interdisciplinary collaboration within MSU among: the MSU Libraries, particularly its Vincent Voice Library; MATRIX: The Center for the Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences On-Line in the College of Arts and Letters; the Speech Processing Laboratory in the College of Engineering; the Teacher Education Program in the College of Education; and the MSU Museum.

External partners in the venture are: H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences On-Line; the Center for Spoken Language and Understanding at the University of Colorado; the Chicago Historical Society; Oyez, Oyez, Oyez and History and Politics Out Loud at Northwestern University; and InvoTek Inc.

Consulting partners on the NGSW include the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania, the Oral History Association, the American Political Science Association and the American Historical Association.

National Gallery of the Spoken Word Gallery Collections

The collections will be added as the project progresses. The proposed collections will include over 60,000 bibliographic records. Drawing from the rich collections of the Chicago Historical Society, Michigan State University's Vincent Voice Library, the MSU Museum and Northwestern University. Collections within the NGSW will include:

News and Newsmakers: Drawing primarily on the holdings of MSU's Vincent Voice Library, this collection will include selections of speeches by Theodore Roosevelt, Eugene V. Debs and Buffalo Bill Cody, as well as news broadcasts and special events from 1940 through the 1980s which are currently housed as part of the Historical Voices and Janak Collections at MSU.

20th Century Inventors and Scientists: From Thomas Edison's first cylinder recordings to John Glenn talking about exploring space, this collection will include recordings that are historically significant both because of their content and their speaker, as well as the technical achievements discussed. These holdings are currently located in the Vincent Voice Library at MSU.

American Life: Using the oral interviews on which Studs Terkel based his books, and which are owned by the Chicago Historical Society, this collection will broadcast a broad range of American experience and stories that span social, political and cultural life in the 20th Century.

Chicago Neighborhoods: Owned by the Chicago Historical Society, this collection includes family genealogies and oral histories conducted in several Chicago neighborhoods by local high school students. These recordings provide a detailed account of urban life and offer a full range of neighborhood accents for linguistic study.

Folk Life and Lore: This collection is composed of taped interviews with a variety of American folk artists. Recorded stories of Native American quilters and Mexican American folk artists from across the Midwest are a special strength of the collection. These holdings are currently housed at the MSU Museum.

History and Politics Out Loud: Voices of U.S. presidents, secretaries of state and other government officials make up the vast majority of this collection, which is housed at Northwestern University.

Supreme Court Decisions: U.S. justices and a range of court cases can be heard in these recordings, providing a far greater range of experience to listeners than reading the transcripts alone. This collection is also provided by Northwestern University.

World War II: Including a selection of broadcast news from the Ripps collection at the Vincent Voice Library at MSU, this collection includes broadcast news recorded from 1940 to 1945, from Pearl Harbor to the dropping of the atomic bombs