PARADISEC Activity Update – August 2022

PARADISEC has enjoyed an active first half of 2022. We were awarded a LIEF grant from the Australian Research Council to future-proof PARADISEC and modularise and modernise our archiving infrastructure over the two year funding period. This is, of course, excellent news for PARADISEC’s sustainability and resilience into the future. In terms of the archival collections, … Read more

Mouldy Mayhem

mouldy tapeRecently the call came to the Sydney office of PARADISEC that a collection of tapes had arrived in Melbourne that needed some cleaning (see the earlier post here). The tapes were from Madang in Papua New Guinea and had been recorded in the 1960s. They contained valuable and rare records of language and music of PNG.

When the tapes arrived they were visibly covered in a white mould and so the PARADISEC audio preservation team moved into action to remediate the tapes ready for digitisation.

Mould is a common form of contamination of magnetic analogue tape that creates problems as the infected tape will not give a clear signal when played back. Even a small speck of dust or mould can cause a gap between the tape and the head resulting in a drop out of sound.

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The living archive of Aboriginal languages – call for expressions of interest

CALL FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST DEVELOP A USER-FRIENDLY SEARCH INTERFACE AND TOUCHPAD APP FOR A DIGITAL ARCHIVE OF LITERATURE IN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGES THE LIVING ARCHIVE PROJECT Submission date: 30 April 2012 During the era of bilingual education in the NT, books were produced in 25 Literature Production Centres in more than 16 languages. These materials … Read more

NRPIPA Symposium in Darwin 13-14 August 2011

Another stunning array of papers and associated performances will feature at the 10th Annual Symposium of NRPIPA (The National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia). This year there will be a focus on community databases for access to recordings. Venue: North Australian Research Unit, The Australian National University, Darwin, 13–14 August 2011 Presented in … Read more