Thursday, July 15, 1999

Grant puts sound bytes online: Project to enhance research resources, voice search engine

By MELISSA BURDEN
State News Staff Writer

Students and faculty searching for sound bytes on Thomas Edison inventions or Babe Ruth home runs will soon be able to access a Web site devoted to a century of historical sound recordings.

With a five-year, $3.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation Digital Library Initiative program, MSU will head a research project that includes digitizing sound recordings and developing search techniques for voice recordings — the first of its kind.

Some recordings are now available on the Web through The National Gallery of the Spoken Word (www.ngsw.org).

“The main goal is to make rich sound resources widely available over the Internet,” said Mark Kornbluh, director of MATRIX: The Center for the Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences Online. “We will be developing a whole hierarchy of search techniques for sound files.”

For example, the new search devices will take a listener to specific points in the recordings, saving them the time of searching through hours of tapes, said Kornbluh, also an associate professor of history.

“That’s very useful for researchers, teachers and students or journalists trying to find a sound clip for a broadcast,” he said.

The new Web site will enhance MSU’s G. Robert Vincent Voice Library, which already contains taped speeches, performances, lectures, interviews and broadcasts of more than 50,000 people, Kornbluh said.

“MSU has one of the largest collections of sound recordings in the world,” he said. “For the past three years we’ve been working to provide greater access to this rich resource.”

The four phases of the National Gallery of the Spoken Word’s project include setting up the search databases, digitizing the sound bytes or making them sound clearer by using computers, setting guidelines for future Web sound clips and developing applications for education on-line exhibits and lesson plans.

Starting fall 2000, MSU hopes to run some prototype curriculums with the Baldwin and Oak Park school districts.

Developing new educational programs to accompany the research will help students better visualize events in history, while adding more excitement to learning, said Joyce Grant, an associate professor of education and a participant in the project.

“It will (enhance learning),” she said. “There’s a lot of stuff out there people haven’t heard.

“The more qualitative materials we make available to them, the more I think we can expand their horizons.”

The major research initiative will make MSU’s collection of sound recordings easier for people to access specific information from sound recordings, said Wendy Wilkins, College of Arts and Letters dean.

“Right now this is a very rich collection but is very hard to use,” she said. “What this research does is make it user-friendly.”

Faculty and students from not only MSU will benefit from the new search techniques, said Wilkins who oversees such studies at MSU as humanities.

“This very rich archival resource will become available to students, faculty members all over the world,” she said.

Researchers from MSU, who include faculty and staff from education, engineering and libraries, will be joined by other researchers from the University of Colorado, Northwestern University and the Chicago Historical Society.

Federal funding is provided from agencies including the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, NASA, The Library of Congress, National Library of Medicine and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.