부산대학교 도서관

For this fifth installment of our Community Audio Archiving series, Mary Kidd (Systems and Operations Manager for New York Public Library's Preservation and Collections Processing Department) discusses the Preserve This Podcast project that she and fellow archivists developed to teach independent producers how to archive and preserve their podcast content. Operating with Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funding through a grant to the Metropolitan New York Library Council, Preserve This Podcast ran from 2018-2020 and included a series of in-person educational workshops held in cities throughout the country, as well as online curriculum-building with lesson plans and activities, an instructional podcast, reading list, and additional resources designed to familiarize producers with principles for personal digital archiving. In this piece, Kidd discusses podcasting's prominence within our contemporary digital audio environment and notes some of the challenges of identifying and preserving independently produced podcasts, which account for the majority of content in today's podcast ecosystem but are often inaccessible through or quickly disappear from catalogs of commercial distribution platforms such as Apple or Spotify. Direct outreach to content creators, she argues, is an important strategy for protecting this content from permanent loss but is not an adequate substitute for building collections at scale using digital preservation infrastructures of established university and government archives. Citing several noteworthy projects currently underway to build podcasting collections, she argues the importance of a community-based approach rooted in direct outreach to and collaboration with communities of content creators, which she says is vital for preserving these communities' sound recordings, metadata, and supporting documentation in forms that respect producers' own intentions and meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]