The AudiAnnotate Project: Four Case Studies in Publishing Annotations for Audio and Video

Access to audio collections is often restricted by institutions for copyright, privacy, and preservation reasons, but it is the lack of descriptive metadata and annotations that stands in the way of all levels of access and use. Libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) often hold physical audio artifacts that are unmarked and lacking important identifiable information such as title, date, location, subject, participants, or context. Annotating is only one of a list of scholarly primitives including discovering, comparing, referring, sampling, illustrating, and representing . IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) is one standardized solution that LAMs have adopted for giving users the ability to perform these primitives with images held in cultural heritage institutions. The AudiAnnotate project builds on the new IIIF standards for AV to address the gaps in engaging with audio by developing a solution to bring together free audio annotation tools and the Web as a standardized collaboration and presentation platform. The AudiAnnotate use case presented here includes a presentation by Tanya Clement titled Zora Neale Hurston's WPA field recordings in Jacksonville, FL (1939) which provides context to three recordings of Hurston created during the Works Project Administration Federal Writers Project from 1937-1942 and made available online at the Library of Congress as part of the Florida Folklife Collections Florida Memory (FM) project.