Missing from the picture are the three boxes of cassette tapes that I'm digitizing, using the equipment pictured here! The cassette tapes contain recordings of oral history interviews that date back to 1978. The interviews were conducted by Elphinstone Pioneer Museum (Gibsons' original museum and an SCMA precursor) staff and volunteers, and feature the voices of an array of long-time locals, many of whom are no longer living. There are stories about logging, fishing, homesteading, housework, schoolteachers, one-room schools, social life, and much more. They're absolutely precious - and vulnerable, too. Cassette tapes don't last. The tape is extremely fragile (especially when it's old), the mechanisms inside them can get all gummed up. They're not a stable medium for storing such important information.
So, one by one, I'm digitizing these old cassettes. The tape deck in the picture is equipped with a USB connection. A cable connects the deck to the computer, which records the sound coming out of the tape deck using a simple, free program called Audacity. Once the tape's played out, I save the sound file in both .wav and .mp3 format, burn the works to a DVD, and voila - accessible oral history!
It's a fairly time-consuming job, since everything has to be recorded in real time, as the tape plays back. No shortcuts here. But things are coming along pretty decently. So far, nearly half of the cassettes have been digitized, and about a third burnt to DVD. Well. Now we need some folks to transcribe a few of the interviews that never were transcribed before! Can you use a computer? Can you type quickly and accurately? Send us an email! We'd love to hear from you.
