First of all it’s a great privilege to be here with IMLS.
I’m like a fan of, huge fan of libraries and museums, both; and I see StoryCorps had
a very long and deep relationship with both museums and libraries and now with IMLS as
well.
StoryCorps has only been around for eight years.
And I think that the technological innovations leading up to the creation of StoryCorps may
be more dramatic than what’s happened since StoryCorps came into existence.
And, you know a lot of people - people sometimes refer to StoryCorps like the anti-Twitter
because it’s kind of two people having a human conversation face to face.
But if it wasn’t for technology StoryCorps couldn’t happen.
I mean, I’m not a tech person, but we have whatever trillo-bytes, whatever bytes of data
associated with these 40,000 interviews we’ve done; about 40,000 hours of digital audio
we have done.
First digital audio collection I believe to go into the Library of Congress.
That kind of, the archiving we do - a public archive that hopefully will exist at some
point in the not too distant future.
The dissemination of the stories over the Internet, over Facebook that millions of people
watch our animations on YouTube, if not for the advances in digital technology StoryCorps
couldn’t be.
Especially on kind of the Medidata and all that sort of, the archiving of this stuff,
it would just be physically impossible to do without the advances in technology.
The big transition had to do with switching to digital audio, and editing on computers
and sending files over the Internet and that kind of stuff; and there actually has been
progress, I mean when we started StoryCorps we literally burnt to CDs for our participants
and then did the, and I’m not even sure when we transferred to hard drives, I guess
we did do transfers to hard drives; but now of course, while I describe StoryCorps as
you walk away with a CD and another CD goes to the Library of Congress, there is actually
a digital file that goes to the Library of Congress.
So there are advances that have happened and obviously you know storage is much cheaper
than it was years ago.
There are advances, but those advances haven’t really changed the hardened substance of what
we do.
My life is essentially doing StoryCorps and taking care of my kids.
My museum and library experience is largely bringing my kids to the library, and you go
to libraries and museums, other than the StoryCorps interaction, but clearly, I mean I think that,
you know libraries and museums seem to be doing a very intrepid smart job of integrating
technology everywhere possible and not in a way that, in my experience, it isn’t kind
of an overkill, just kind of trying to jump to the front of the technological line, but
kind of watching to see what the environment is and then picking smart kind of interactive
projects and then integrating them into libraries, so I’ve been very impressed.
Everything from the way that, from integrating digital materials into collections to the
way, I already said I did something at the Philadelphia Public Library, free library
a couple of days ago and the digital signage that they had outside, the way that they were
marketing stuff, I thought was very smart. �