Dissemination

“Distribution is preservation” — Elizabeth Cohen, 2000

Original audio tape box from Alan Lomax's 1962 Caribbean fieldtrip (St. Patrick's, Grenada).

In an age when devastating fires often laid waste to libraries, Thomas Jefferson advanced a novel approach to safeguarding the precious records of human history and ideas - that of wide dissemination. "Let us save what remains," he urged Ebenezer Hazard, the father of documentary preservation in America, in 1791, "not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use... but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident." With the exponential growth of archives since Jefferson's time, and the proliferation of documentation in all media, his strategy took a back seat to the need to stabilize and conserve documentary information and develop methods for protecting collections. Today's remarkable development of digital technologies, however, makes it possible to realize and to expand the Jeffersonian paradigm.

Electronic media behave differently than their analog counterparts and offer new possibilities for preservation. Sound recordings, film, photographs, manuscripts, and other forms of analog documentation can now be reformatted, reproduced, and even created in digital formats. A variety of formats are available for encoding digital media -all stored as bits (ones and zeros) on computer hard drives and other carriers such as digital tape. Two properties distinguish them from their analog ancestors: they are quickly, inexpensively, and accurately reproducible with little or no generational loss; and, to prevent information loss, they require constant use, rather than infrequent handling. Therefore, through dissemination, electronic media are more secure and long-lasting. Jefferson's dream has come to fruition.

"Instant communications systems and recording devices," wrote Alan Lomax in 1985, "make it possible for oral traditions to reach their audience, to establish "libraries and museums, and to preserve and record...songs, tales, and dramas directly in sound and vision without printing them in another medium." In her keynote address to the Folk Heritage Collections in Crisis Symposium at the Library of Congress in 2000, Elizabeth Cohen reiterated Alan's words in terms of the problems facing folklore repositories, challenging them to rethink the concept of preservation. "Distribution is the key to preserving audio folklore collections in the twenty-first century. In fact, distribution is preservation."

From 1997 to 2005, following the best-practice audio preservation guidelines prescribed by the Library of Congress, ACE digitally reformatted Alan Lomax's original sound and video recordings and documentary photographs. Today we can share these collections with regional repositories, as well as with artists, their families, and their communities. The collections are also offered online, accessible through multimedia catalogs.