Follow the Fellows: Pop Up Archive: Mashups and archival trainings galore
Tomorrow, October 26 is the last day of the 2012 SoundCloud Community Fellowship. Stay tuned for a special wrap-up post tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy this guest blog post by Fellows Pop Up Archive on the latest update of the mashup contest they’re hosting to bring archiving to life, and their experience hosting an archival-training class!
Muesli on Jaws: Mashups and archival trainings galore
When we saw the latest version of Mozilla’s PopcornMaker last week, we had to take it for a spin. The resulting mashup is based on SoundCloud Community Fellow Jake De Grazia’s Outtake: Adam on Jaws, plus some other building blocks from the ongoing Pop Up Archive 2012 Mashup Contest.
Want a free SoundCloud Pro account? It just take a few minutes to submit a mashup. For the contest (full description and rules here), we collected archival material from SoundCloud Community Fellows around three themes: Ambiance, Election Season, and Voices. We’ve heard some great submissions so far, and to give you some extra time we’ve extended the contest deadline to November 15. We’re not expecting you to sink much time on this, so don’t be afraid — get mashing!
Add your audio mashup to the Pop Up Archive 2012 Mashup Contest group for consideration in the contest. Extra points go to anyone who takes it a step further and “illustrates” their audio using Zeega or Mozilla’s PopcornMaker, like we did in the example above. They’re both super simple, and they play nice with SoundCloud. Just click the “Share” button under your SoundCloud track and use the “Link” provided as the media source. Then add timestamped maps, images, video, or just about anything you’d like.
Meanwhile, archives are popping up all over the place. We hosted our first two rounds of producer trainings on October 9th, and a third round on October 23rd. We were joined by a diverse group of producers, collectors, archivists, and oral historians — among them were the Center for Home Movies, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University, CFRC 101.9 FM Queen’s Radio, the Society for American Baseball Research, Activist Archivists, WITNESS, the Southern Oral History Program, the Directors Guild of America Visual History Program, PBS Need to Know, and Northwest Folklife. Big thanks to all the participants!
We shared tips on setting up a lightweight multimedia archive, the differences between content management systems, and archival best practices. We also talked about our work with SoundCloud, Omeka and the Internet Archive, and shared a bit about what we have planned for the next few months. If you’re feeling sad that you missed it, don’t despair! We’re recruiting candidates to beta test our system with free support, so if you’ve got a collection in need of archiving, we’d love to hear from you: popuparchive@gmail.com.
Deadline for submissions is Thursday, November 15th. We’ll pick one winner per theme, to be announced on Monday, November 26. Each winner will receive a one year SoundCloud Pro membership. Good luck!