An Incredible Audio Archive in the Making Nieman...

An Incredible Audio Archive in the Making

Anne Wootton and Bailey Smith, winners of a $300,000 Knight News Challenge grant, are the creators of Pop Up Archive. They are building open-source software and partnering with the Internet Archive to streamline the entire workflow of a radio producer — from ingestion to cataloging to eventual distribution.

“What’s closest to our heart is saving oral history. It’s actually easier to lose your material that’s digital than it is to lose something that was on a tape,” Smith told me. Data gets corrupted, or just lost. Thousands of files called 000001.WAV become meaningless to humans.

FJP: Oh man. This will be so incredibly useful.

Bonus: Here’s an FJP interview with David Gerlach, founder of Blank on Blank, which is slightly different and equally awesome.