Field Trip: USF’s Gleeson Library

Oh, I’m so excited! I have a field trip today. My internship site supervisor and I are going to the Gleeson Library at USF in order to research the history and other details of the Jesuit Tape Collection which is housed at the Graduate Theological Union library in Berkeley.

Hopefully we will get some good information that will help to clear up some of the copyright concerns that have been plaguing the progress of the digitization project. Really, I think some fresh information might give us a new direction and more importantly, new contacts.

Well, I must plan my trip into the city! I will update with more details later.

Updated 7/23/2010 10:57pm PST

The field trip was a success. Admittedly, I wasn’t sure of what all of the goals were before going to the meeting. Potential collaboration with USF is one, as well as the gathering of tape and institution history (at least for the portion of the tape collection originating from USF). Whatever all of the goals were, the meeting was very positive.

My site supervisor Melodie, Sean (our project volunteer), and I met with three librarians from USF to describe the project, and to discover if any of the reel-to-reel holdings at the Gleeson Library are copies of those from the Jesuit Tape Collection at GTU Library. Additionally, as it is possible that USF may have a claim to some of the intellectual property–at least to those tapes originating from USF Summer Sessions in the 1960s, there is additional incentive to collaborate on the project. That aside–as intellectual property issues are complex for pre-1972 sound recordings, and we are still researching it–the information on the institutional history gave us a great starting point for finding new and important information on the project.

It seems that the meeting has breathed new life into the digitization project.

Very exciting stuff.

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