Today I worked on Miriam Breckenridge's Oral History that she recorded with Alta Horton Ellis. Alta is a very unique historical figure because her father was the first Forest Ranger in the Sawtooth Valley and he was stationed at the Pole Creek Ranger Station. She depicts what life was like for him and others that served the Forest Service in the early days of settlement in Idaho.
Clipping these audio records into very short sound-bites is difficult because there is so much interesting and prevalent information in every one of these oral histories. Choosing the photos to accompany them is even harder because of our vast collection of photos from 1881 to the 1960s and beyond here at the Regional History Department at the Community Library.
Today I also started getting the oral histories in their entirety saved in system memory so that they can be used later without requiring disks. Also there are also some rumors running around the Regional History Department that we are going to be posting on LunaCommons.org! We will keep you posted!
A major challenge that I overcame today dealt with converting audio streams in audacity. On one of the oral histories the right stereo track on the recording went out completely and the audio was only playing out one speaker. Since there was no equalizer that could get sound from the right speaker in the audio editing program I was using I had to work with the problem in a much more improvised manner. I had to convert the track to a mono (single speaker) track, then duplicate the mono track, target each track at a different speaker, and mix the audio back together.
(Because many of our materials are copyrighted you may see this photo a lot)
No comments:
Post a Comment