The Archive currently contains over 35,000 recordings, including approximately 2,500 video recordings. New material is added every week. The Archive hopes steadily to increase the proportion of material recorded on video, since the equipment involved is now much less obtrusive than a few years ago, and the recording capacities far greater.

The Archive also holds extensive related documentation, chiefly detailed contemporaneous notes, handouts or overheads of many of the Talks, Interviews and other recorded material.  These fill 150 document boxes.

A complete catalogue of the Archive is in preparation and will be placed on the website in stages. It is hoped the catalogue will be completed and online within the next year. It will be searchable in multiple fields – speaker, date, location, subject area, title/topic and key words

What follows is a preliminary and very incomplete  selection  from the Catalogue in the form of a bare chronology of the recordings  for a selection of individual months designed to give a first impression of the contents of the Archive and to allow access to a very small initial selection of recordings.

The Index of the Catalogue by Speaker, Topic and other fields will be added.

Links allowing the recordings themselves to be accessed will be added gradually as resources permit,  in the case of those recordings for which

i) permission to make the material available online has been granted by the holder of the copyright (usually the speaker)

See Section of Website on Copyright : Access and Downloads

ii) the recording has been remastered digitally or was already in a digital format.. Most of the recordings made since 2000 are already in digital form. The earlier recordings will be reformatted digitally as resources permit, and any necessary audio restoration work undertaken. Given the size of the Archive this will take time. Digitalisation is also vital for the long term preservation of the material.

In the case of material not covered by i), permission must be obtained from the holder of the copyright before the material can be made available to enquirers.

 

PROGRESS REPORT :  October 2009

The catalogue is still very much in the early stages of compilation, but progress has been made.

The Pages covering the years  from 1973 to 1999 so far contain only a very preliminary listing of a few of the highlights – this section of the catalogue is still at the “Lucky Dip” stage.  The material is listed under very brief headings giving an indication of  some of the major conferences, colloquia. lecture courses, seminar series and other events recorded over this period.  Additional entries will be steadily added, and those entries already entered will be greatly expanded, giving details of speakers and titles of talks and other  information and will be allocated to precise dates within the monthly pages for each year.

The pages covering the years 1999  to 2007 contain  monthly listings of many – though still by no means all – of the recordings made month by month. These listings are at this point in the form of short entries, giving, in the case of e.g. conferences/colloquia /symposia,  just the name and date of the event and the number of recordings made.

Typically such a listing is currently in the following form

Under eg JULY 2000

17th – 22nd JULY 2000  CT 2000 COMO

International Category Theory Meeting 2000 Villa Olmo, Lake Como, Italy

Total :  33 Recordings.  Details of recordings with information on speaker, title, duration to be added.

Links to Conference Programme, Abstracts, Overheads and other Information to be added.

The information in these monthly pages thus forms a framework – itself still far from finished – which will be brought to completion, so as to provide a short listing of all the recordings held for each month.  Within that  framework the entries for each month will be steadily expanded to give more complete information : in the case of conferences or symposia this would be a detailed listing of the individual recordings with information on speaker, title, duration of recording and links to supporting information (eg abstracts and overheads)  To this finished version the links to the recordings themselves, whether video or audio files, will be added,  as resources permit, provided the requirements i) and ii) above are satisfied.

The pages covering the years 2008 and 2009 contain a substantially complete listing of all the recordings in the Archive for those years.  This section of the catalogue is now close to its completed form. Links to the recordings themselves within the last 2 years – in the case where requirements i) and ii) above have been met – will be provided shortly.

Around 500 of these recordings from 2008-2009 are now uploaded and ready to go online, it is hoped within the next 30-45 days.  Further recordings from those years will be added.  A further short selection of material from previous years,  initially back  to 1999 should be ready to go online by the end of the year.  We hope to place a steadily growing  proportion of the (already digitalised) material from the last 10 years online as the catalogue for those years is completed, but this will depend on being able to attract funding for additional server space and other expenses involved.

The material in the first 25 + years (1973-99) requires to be digitalised in its entirety and some restoration work on the older recordings also needs to be undertaken before they are ready to go online.  The funding requirements for this larger commitment – it should be recalled that  the Archive houses 35,000 recordings in all –  are detailed in the “Project” Section of the Archive Home Page.  Individual recordings of particular interest/importance will be digitalised and made available – where copyright release requirements have been met – as soon as possible, where  funding permits.  Meanwhile, it is planned to complete the compilation of the entire catalogue back to 1973 in regular stages