Sound Advice: Affordable, Responsible Practices for Producing and Managing Audio Content

This workshop will cover the ways in which oral historians, podcasters, and recorders of public presentations can best prepare their materials for archival ingest.

Brett Dion, our workshop instructor, will recommend best practices for applying budget-minded audio technology during recording, post-production, and storage. He will discuss interview environments, microphone placement, audio basics and troubleshooting, file formats, recording gear, metadata, alternatives to outsourcing transcription, and working with the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer.

Participants will learn:

• how to prepare for an audio recording, including best practices, good practices and best-to-avoid practices

• recommended approaches to preserving master recordings, plus editing and compressing derivative copies

• indexing the recording content as an alternative to transcription

• the basics of the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer

Laptops are required for this course.

About our instructor

In October 2015, Brooklyn Historical Society hired Brett Dion as Oral History Project Archivist. With funding for the project from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), Brett was responsible for processing and describing the Voices of Generations: Investigating Brooklyn’s Cultural Identity oral history collections and managing a processing team of three interns. Prior to BHS, Brett worked as a Registrar and Archives Technician for the New York Transit Museum where he maintained records for collections and processed, cataloged and digitized photographs, maps, artifacts, film and video, and other materials for the museum’s collection management system and exhibitions. Brett has twelve years of digitization experience, including magnetic tape, and holds a BA in Communications from Hofstra University and a Masters of Science with Archives Certification from Pratt Institute’s School of Information & Library Science, where he graduated with distinction.