FLEISCHHAUER next demonstrated sound recording, which included texts.
Recycled from a previous project, the collection included sixty 78-rpm
phonograph records of political speeches that were made during and
immediately after World War I. These constituted approximately three
hours of audio, as AM has digitized it, which occupy 150 megabytes on a
CD. Thus, they are considerably compressed. From the catalogue card,
FLEISCHHAUER proceeded to a transcript of a speech with the audio
available and with highlighted text following it as it played.
A photograph has been added and a transcription made.
Considerable value has been added beyond what the Library of Congress
normally would do in cataloguing a sound recording, which raises several
questions for AM concerning where to draw lines about how much value it can
afford to add and at what point, perhaps, this becomes more than AM could
reasonably do or reasonably wish to do. FLEISCHHAUER also demonstrated
a motion picture. As FREEMAN had reported earlier, the motion picture
materials have proved the most popular, not surprisingly. This says more
about the medium, he thought, than about AM's presentation of it.
Because AM's goal was to bring together things that could be used by
historians or by people who were curious about history,
turn-of-the-century footage seemed to represent the most appropriate
collections from the Library of Congress in motion pictures. These were
the very first films made by Thomas Edison's company and some others at
that time. The particular example illustrated was a Biograph film,
brought in with a frame-grabber into a window. A single videodisc
contains about fifty titles and pieces of film from that period, all of
New York City. Taken together, AM believes, they provide an interesting
documentary resource.
******
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
DISCUSSION * Using the frame-grabber in AM * Volume of material processed
and to be processed * Purpose of AM within LC * Cataloguing and the
nature of AM's material * SGML coding and the question of quality versus
quantity *
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
During the question-and-answer period that followed FLEISCHHAUER's
presentation, several clarifications were made.
AM is bringing in motion pictures from a videodisc. The frame-grabber
devices create a window on a computer screen, which permits users to
digitize a single frame of the movie or one of the photographs. It
produces a crude, rough-and-ready image that high school students can
incorporate into papers, and that has worked very nicely in this way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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