Summary
An award in the amount of $7,130.00 to University of California, San Francisco in 2025.
Synopsis
The University of California, San Francisco Library, Archives and Special Collections will digitize and preserve audio from 252 audiocassettes from the collection of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Laurie Garrett. Garrett’s career began in the 1970s and she is known as one of the most prescient voices in public health reporting of the past half-century.
The recordings, spanning the years 1979 to 2000, document Garrett’s groundbreaking investigative work on infectious disease, HIV/AIDS, and global health crises. The collection was acquired by UCSF in 2013 as part of an ongoing initiative to preserve the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, but the audio recordings have remained inaccessible to researchers, since they were stored in off-site boxes and unplayable without specialized equipment. Many of the recordings are on physical media that exceeds 40 years in age, largely recorded on audiocassettes, a magnetic tape recording medium subject to growing risks of deterioration. With this grant, UCSF Archives will contract with The Media Preserve, a preservation-quality digitization vendor, to convert approximately 250 to 275 hours of content into preservation-quality digital surrogates. In addition, metadata and transcripts will be created to make the recordings discoverable through the Online Archive of California.
About the NRPF
The National Recording Preservation Foundation (NRPF) is an independent, charitable organization and registered 501(c)(3) entity. The NRPF works across the United States to foster awareness of the diverse perspectives and communities documented in audio, to support the preservation of historical and at-risk audio collections, and to coordinate resources for the digital preservation of audio recordings. The NRPF was mandated through federal charter by the U.S. Congress under the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000 (Pub. L. 106-474) and was thereafter duly incorporated in 2010.
