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Digital
Life Vests: How Cultural Heritage Institutions can Lend a Hand in Preserving Podcasts
Tuesday, October 5 and 6, 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM ET
Instructors: Mary Kidd and Sarah Nguyen
Every day, indie podcasters are creating and publishing works reflecting their unique perspectives, backgrounds, stories, and communities. Usually working with small
or even no budget or outside of a regular day job, indie podcasters often rely on third-party platforms to save their work, which in some cases has resulted in catastrophic digital file loss. Preserve This Podcast (PTP) was a two-year Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
grant-funded project whose goal was to not only teach a personal digital preservation curriculum tailored to podcasters, but also raise awareness over the ephemeral nature of the world wide web and the precariousness of commercial and proprietary platforms.
This two-part webinar will introduce participants to podcasting, a medium defined by a complex "systems ecosystem" consisting of digital audio files (namely WAVs
and MP3s), distribution mechanisms (RSS feeds) and platforms providing services to both podcasters and listeners. In part one of the webinar, PTP will step through the curriculum devised by the PTP team, briefly go over the history of the development of podcast
technology, and "prove" that some of the earliest podcasts have, in fact, disappeared. Part two will focus on RSS technology and how PTP devised their own homegrown mechanism to preserve their own podcast and website beyond their grant funding. We will end
with providing some examples of current institutional podcast collecting efforts, and discuss how participants might envision incorporating elements of the PTP curriculum into what they do at their respective GLAM institution or organization.
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