Ruth Maguire, interviewed by Yixin Wei (1)

Ruth Maguire, interviewed by Yixin Wei (1)

The Life of a Sound Archive

A sound clip of Ruth Maguire talking about the process of sound archive cataloguing

Yixin Wei

Interview with Ruth Maguire in 2023

16/08/23

You may use this item in accordance with the licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

.mp3

English

Oral History

2:51

OK, so for, well, when we're cataloguing the collections, it really starts at the beginning. So, when we first look at a collection, so either if it's newly brought into the archives, if it's newly brought into the archives, you'll have the accession it and just record that you've taken it in, and give it a a unique reference number, things like that. So, the cataloguing really starts at that point where you have an overview of the collection, you check it all out and you do like a survey of it to see, you know, how many items are in the collection, what condition they're in, if there's any metadata on the boxes, is there any paperwork with it? So, those sort of things. And then you'll make a note of those. Once you have done that, you can then give it to Richard to digitise, once he's digitised it we can do the proper cataloguing side of it, so we will take the items and we'll give each individual item a reference number. So, for example, an interview will be one item. We'll then note down the people that are involved in it, the details about the interviewee, anything we know, so their date of birth, their name, languages that are used, their address so that we can contact them later if we need to rights clear the recording. We then do the content of the recording itself, so we'll do a summary. So, we'll either listen to the recording or we'll use a transcript that's already been created, or a summary that's already been created, just to create a shorter, concise summary for the cataloguing entry. We'll also note down any subjects, any main subjects that are mentioned in the recording, time periods, location, and if there's any other related materials. For example, if they discuss photographs and we also hold the photographs, or they discuss a document and we also have the document, and then we'll have the date, there'll be digitised information about the audio. So, for example, the recordist sound quality, the format. And it's like that and once... so we've got like a spreadsheet that we have created with the necessary fields that you need to complete, so you just complete that and then once the entries are completed, we can upload that spreadsheet to our cataloguing software and then it can be made accessible to the public, so they can look at the catalogue online and see if there's items they want to come in and listen to. And yeah, and then that's the end of the cataloguing process.

Yixin Wei

Ruth Maguire

EMOHA