(Note: This post was authored by Taylor McNeilly, Processing & Reference Archivist.) Welcome back to another #WyattWalkerWednesday post! I know it’s been awhile since our last installment, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy. Since the library is closed the next two weeks for Winter Break, I wanted to leave you all with at least one more blog post before 2019.

One of the most exciting things that’s been happening behind the scenes here at RBSC with the Walker Collection is the return of the audio cassettes that comprised the test batch for digitization. These ten cassettes were the earliest recordings donated as part of the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection, including some recordings dating to 1963. This year was a momentous one for both the Walkers and the Civil Rights Movement, and is also the year that audio cassettes first hit public retail. Due to some preservation concerns with magnetic tape and its durability over 50 years, we wanted to make sure these tapes got digitized first and any audio left on them could be safely digitized, thereby making these recordings accessible into the future. (Of course, digitization alone isn’t enough to preserve digital files forever – you need digital preservation for that. But that’s a different topic for another day!)

I’m happy to report that all ten of these earliest recordings were salvageable, although the audio isn’t perfect quality by today’s standards. Of the ten cassettes sent as the test batch, eight of them included a total of five recordings from April and early May 1963 – the beginning of Project C, the Birmingham, AL campaign that Dr. Walker was chief strategist for. These are therefore very exciting for a variety of reasons, and we’re working at top speed to make these publicly accessible as soon as possible.

While work on these ten recordings to make them publicly accessible continues, I’m also wrapping up the work necessary to send the remaining cassettes out to our digitization vendor to undergo the same process. Due to the high volume of shipping that happens around the holidays and the library’s closure for the next few weeks, these cassettes will be shipped out in early January. The total number of cassettes in this shipment will be around 750 (some of the remaining cassettes will not be digitized because they are commercial recordings still in their sealed packaging), so the time needed to digitize them all will obviously be much longer. Nonetheless, I hope that work on making these available to the public can begin in the early springtime of 2019.

While this work on the audio cassettes has gone on, I haven’t been ignoring the manuscript portion of the collection, either. As you may recall, our main focus has been on the manuscript material this past year, and work will continue into 2019 until this portion of the collection can be opened for research. RBSC expects at least one more, large-scale donation to the collection, after which a revised timeline can be devised. As always, please check back here for progress on that front as well as any other news on the Walker Collection or other posts about RBSC and our activities!