The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Library and Archives has a wealth of analog audio and video material related to the history of biology and medicine in the twentieth century. This material includes oral history interviews, audio recordings from scientific workshops at the Banbury Conference Center, and CSHL promotional materials from the 1980s.
To preserve this material, the Library and Archives applied for and received a CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) Grant for Recordings at Risk. These grants are funded by the Mellon Foundation and “support the preservation of rare and unique audio, audiovisual and other time-based media of high scholarly value through digital reformatting.” (Read more here on the CLIR website.)
Our 2021 CLIR grant supported the digitization of analog media and we now offer access to some of the material, such as the oral histories, on the web through our oral history website. Other digitized materials are currently available for in-library use. CSHL Archives finding aids have been updated to reflect the new access points. CSHL archivists and interns have also added enhanced descriptive and technical metadata at the collection and file levels to increase searchability and retrievability of materials.
The media now available in digital form include interviews with prominent researchers and nobel laureates such as David Baltimore, Elizabeth Blackburn, Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, Nancy Hopkins, Barbara McClintock, and James Watson. The material from Banbury meetings held in the 1970s and 1980s includes material related to cancer, gene therapy, AIDS and other topics of broad scientific and public interest.