Principal Investigator: Paul Conway (Associate Professor, UMSI). His principal responsibilities were to oversee digitization, post-processing, and metadata activities, supervise graduate students, lead the design of the delivery system, and report on the project in writing and public presentations.
Co-Principal Investigator: Kelly M. Askew (Professor, Anthropology, Afroamerican and African Studies, Institute for Social Research). She provided deep domain expertise in African music and culture, identified programs for the initial pilot of the access system and access portal, handled media relations, kept Leo and Mary Sarkisian appraised of project progress, and co-produced presentations, publications, and reports on the project.
UM Library Liaison:Shannon Zachary (Head of Preservation and Conservation, UM Library) provided an essential administrative and professional link between the Principal Investigator the Library. She arranged for the Library to make space available in a Library building for the project team, loaned computer workstations for use by student staff, and arranged for the physical storage of the Leo Sarkisian Archive.
UM Library Technical Support:Rob McIntyre (Coordinator of Digital Asset Management Systems, UM Library) provided essential technical advice and services. He established a dedicated partition on the Kaltura access system, trained project staff in the use of Kaltura, configured the distinctive metadata scheme that the project staff developed, and ingested the completed access derivatives, script images, and XML metadata record into Kaltura. He also served as technical liaison to the UM Information Technology Services group that made space available in the university’s preservation repository.
Student staff:NEH supported graduate students to work on various aspects of the project.
Summer 2016
Kayla Carucci (tape processing)
Leigh Gialanella (finding aid; website development)
Jacob Kidd (audio tape processing)
Stephanie Zang (website development)
Academic Year 2016-17
Jacob Kidd (project coordination; user interface design; access system configuration)Leigh Gialanella (files processing and metadata creation)Kaitlyn Sisk (metadata creation; OCR experiments)
Summer 2017
Molly Szymanski (project coordination; radio program processing; ResCarta metadata creation; primary quality assurance; project documentation)
Randall McCombs (script scanning; OCR processing and cleanup; ResCarta metadata creation; quality assurance)
Academic Year 2017-18
Molly Szymanski (project coordination; liaison for access system development radio program processing; ResCarta quality assurance; research on international music copyright rules; primary quality assurance; project documentation;)
Claire Marshall (radio program processing; ResCarta metadata creation;
System Design Consultant:Walker Boyle (Software Developer, Thoughtworks in Chicago, IL) was involved with the Leo Sarkisian Archive as a graduate student at the University of Michigan School of Information. As a consultant for the NEH project, Walker rebuilt and expanded the capabilities of a demo site into a prototype access system for the sound recordings and program scripts.
Digitization Vendor:MediaPreserve of Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania, provided digitization services for the project under contract to the University of Michigan.