Bringing the Digital Revolution to Judaic Music: The Judaica Sound Archives (JSA)

The Judaica Sound Archives at Florida Atlantic University
(FAU) has been in existence since 1990s with primary
funding from the FAU Libraries and some private funding from
donors. It was started as a grassroots effort by a Cantor to just
preserve and save some cantorial music and has now grown to
encompass all the arrays of Judaica music including as many
as 70,000 recordings. JSA’s aims and objectives have evolved
from the initial goal of establishing a preservation-quality digital
archive for at-risk sources of Judaic music to a full online
delivery system for sound, images and metadata with tools for
scholarly research and annotation. However, what has not
wavered or changed is the total commitment to the highest
quality and resolution for sound and images, excellent work
practices and rigorous quality control and constant evolution
and adaptation to new evolving technologies for audio and
textual digitization.
This abstract describes the JSA project from its inception to its
current phase, showcasing the innovative work that is being
done to develop this project, using computer technology to
overcome certain challenges and the usage of computing in a
unique method to make this collection more accessible to a
wider range of scholars and students.
JSA came about as a result of a fortuitous collision between of
a corpus of music recordings being donated to the FAU
Libraries and the rapid advances in digital technologies at FAU
Libraries making music accessibility to the academic users a
possibility. All these recordings are primary sources that revolve
around the life related to Jewish and Yiddish/Hebrew speaking
cultures in the United States in the early and mid-years of the
20th century. The principal work of this project falls into two
broad categories: digitizing rare at-risk recordings and making
these available digitally to the scholars, researchers and students
interested in computing humanities sound recordings. Beginning
with less than a thousand 78 rpm recordings, JSA’s holdings
have expanded to include LP albums, cassette tapes and 45 rpm
records. Taken together, this represents well over 70,000 sound
tracks. The collection is continually growing as a result of
material donations from institutions and individuals. The 78
rpm sound recordings received at JSA are identified by song, performer, and composer and entered into a database which is
searchable on this website. At present the collection holds 3,450
different titles on 78 rpm records, representing almost 7,000
different sound tracks produced between 1901 and the
mid-1950s. And JSA’s current short term goal is to digitize the
best example of every recording in the collection. The original
phonograph records or tapes are saved, shelved and protected
from further damage. One digitized copy is filtered and
enhanced electronically to improve the quality of the sound.
Another is kept in its original form.
According to, Samuel Brylawski, head of Recorded Sound
Section at the Library of Congress,” Digital media have the
advantage of not suffering any loss of information as they are
copied, unlike the generational losses inherent in the duplication
of analog media such as discs and cassette tape. The future of
audio preservation is reformatting audio tapes and discs to
computer files and systematically managing those files.”
University of California reported the first digital audio project
in the 1980s. Since then there has been a steady increase in
digital audio preservation projects. In a survey conducted by
Richard Griscom, about 42 libraries in the US responded to
having some kind of digital audio project available. However,
JSA is the only project in the nation that works on not only
preserving, but also digitizing and making accessible online
and on-site the rare Judaic recordings. Other important work
in the field of audio digitization is being done by Cornell
University, Indiana University and University of California,
Berkeley. However, Indiana University is the only library
system that is dealing with audio that is music much like JSA.
The difference in their approach is that it is not specific to a
certain culture or region and they are more focused on music
images and sheet music scores unlike the JSA focus on making
music files accessible and available. The music is searchable
using a database that implements the Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex
encoding. The music is then streamed onto the listeners’
computer.
This poster discussion will also include the various steps
involved in digitizing audio. We will discuss the Analog Format
Inspection, Playback Equipment Calibration, Analog to Digital
Conversion, Digital Editing System, and Accessibility and
Distribution. For the digital media, the goal is to make the
collection as generic as possible, thereby maximizing
accessibility and setting the stage for easy migration to the next
generation of digital storage.
In conclusion, this poster will provides a detailed overview of
the critical steps relevant to the digitization process of these
analog primary resource materials and making this music
available and searchable online.