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, we now safeguard 184 Terabytes of data, including 27.3 TB of audio data. This amounts to an average ingestion rate of about 1 TB per week over the past 11 months, or 143 GB per day. Comparing back to a similar calculation about a year ago, we were then averaging about 102 GB/day input, so the current rate represents a ~40% increase. (Perhaps we are demonstrating some archival version of Moore’s Law 😉 ). Furthermore, we are on track to pass 400,000 essence items (files) in the collection within the next week or so (currently 399,212).
The True Echoes Project is now wrapping up. PARADISEC worked in partnership with The British Library and other regional partners to digitise and reconnect back into Pacific communities wax cylinders recordings from nineteenth and early twentieth centuries British anthropologists. The project has aimed to improve accessibility to these recordings, both for researchers around the world, and importantly “in partnership with the communities whose cultures the recordings represent, enabling new understanding that is informed by local knowledge and cultural memory.” More information at the project’s webpage: true-echoes.com. True Echoes also inspired the latest episode of our Toksave Podcast, which includes excerpts from the 1904 wax cylinder recordings, and community members from Rigo District (PNG) connecting with the stories and songs of the past. This discussion, along with all previous two seasons (9 episodes) of Toksave, is available here: paradisec.org.au/toksave-podcast/
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