digitization equipment | LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory

Digitizing Archival Cassette Tapes: A Brief How-To

May 22, 2018

Between 1981 and 1986, The Foolscap Gay Oral History Project collected over 100 oral histories with Canadian gay men born in the first half of the 20th century. These interviews, conducted by John Grube and Lionel Collier, were informed by conditions contemporaneous to the project: Operation Soap (police harassment of gay men), HIV/ AIDS, and the proliferation of queer community spaces and groups in Toronto. These interviews were originally recorded on cassette tapes, which have […]

Building our Racks: “Obsolete” Tech and Digital Archives

October 13, 2016

by mckinneycait

Digitization

Over the first two years of the Collaboratory project, we have devoted a lot of energy to setting up technical infrastructure for doing digitization here at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, where our work is based. This has meant finding and servicing good used equipment that will play the “obsolete” media formats that make up the collections, like audio cassette and VHS tapes. Any digitization system begins by assembling what’s called a “Rack.” Here’s a […]