Last month, creators of the Louis “Studs” Terkel Archive project launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter with a mission to raise $75,000. Terkel, who passed away in 2008, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and was host of Chicago’s WFMT radio show for nearly 50 years.
Although the project didn’t attract as many funds as it hoped for early on, it seems to catch actor/director David Schwimmer’s eyes and he backed the project. According to various reports, the Friends star donated a “particularly timely large gift” (the exact amount hasn’t been confirmed yet) that helped the campaign surpass its initial goal.
Funds from the campaign will go towards the following:
- Ensure proper curation and preservation of the Archive by allowing us to hire an Archive Manager and Archive Assistant for six months.
- Helps strengthen technology partnerships by funding the collaborations with PopUp Archive, an online searchable and indexed transcription service; Hyperaudio, a browser-based audio remixing tool; Trint, a text-powered toolkit for searching, editing, and sharing media online; Vamonde‘s hyperlocal storytelling; and Starchive, a file management tool for use with digital archives. It is through these partnerships that we are able to keep the interviews alive and thriving in the digital world where they can be explored and creatively transformed.
- Cover the production and shipping costs for contribution incentives.
Director of syndication for WFMT Radio Network and director of the Studs Terkel Archive, Tony Macaluso, shared details about the archive’s access:
“[The guiding principle makes] it thoroughly searchable thanks to transcriptions and curated categories, easy and fun for anyone to excerpt and share and quick and effective to re-use, whether by a journalists or radio producers looking to augment a timely story with material from the archive or teachers, artists or scholars looking for just the right sound clip to help bring a historic moment, a celebrated thinker or a social experience to life.”
The campaign is set to close this weekend.
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