Pop Up Archive, an online sound library backed by a 2012 Knight News Challenge funding, launches this week.
Co-founders Anne Wootton and Bailey Smith write in a Knight blog post that their original goal “seemed simple: to help audio producers organize their archives and create searchable sound. As we launch Pop Up Archive publicly, our goal has grown much bigger. We want to make it easy for all storytellers to find and reuse recorded sound.”
Partnering with Public Radio Exchange, they’ve made thousands of hours of sound searchable through auto-transcription, auto-tagging and sound management tools.
Content comes from “collections big and small,” such as Pacifica Radio Archives, Illinois Public Media and writer Studs Terkel.
“We’re on the frontier of searchable, data-rich sound — and affordable tools to make that happen,” the two write. “Easily indexed and organized sound means quicker workflows, new access to source material, rediscovery of forgotten voices, and revelations of latent patterns in audio.”