KTRU is Now KTRU

KTRU Rice University radio poster for 19th annual Outdoor Show, 2010

Our student run radio station has successfully regained the call letters KTRU. For more in depth reporting on this, please see the Thresher’s article on the purchase.

Since KTRU still needs to do station IDs, we’d suggest they dig up some of their golden oldies from amazing people who once graced the studio with their presence, like Iggy Pop, Joan Jett, Joey Ramone, Frank Zappa, and Stevie Nicks just to name a few.

We’ve featured some of these IDs on the blog before, but here’s over 14 minutes of station ID bliss.

If you want even more Rice student media, we are currently placing all of The Campanile’s online. We’re currently at 66 in total, but more are going up every week. Each pdf has to pass a number of accessibility steps to be ready for all of our patrons, so it is taking us time.

If you want to take a trip down yearbook lane, feel free to peruse the 1971 edition.

KTRU Tuesdays: Update

While we are not completely finished, we wanted to let our devoted KTRU-ers know that we are updating the news masters at scholarship.rice.edu.

We’ve used the University of Kentucky’s OHMS viewer to index the news masters to ensure that you can find what you need fast.

For example, if you go to scholarship.rice.edu, search for “news masters,” select News Master 4. and click the blue button labeled “Synchronized Viewer,” you’ll see this.

You can click on any indexed part. You can then select “play segment” or “segment link.” If you do the latter, you can post the snippet of audio to Facebook or elsewhere.

We hope you enjoy this added level of functionality.

Upcoming Projects

2017 was an incredibly busy year for the Woodson. It included completing an inventory of all of our rare books, creating new online and physical exhibits, growing our fine arts and Jewish history collections, exhibiting the history of Camp Logan, placing the KTRU Rice Radio archive online, co-hosting the Houston Folk Music Archive Celebration with the Friends of Fondren Library, participating in the Oh Project collection, and helping our Fondren Fellow discover and map the hidden bits of information in our Civil War diaries.

Here’s some of what’s coming up in 2018:

• We’re continuing our participation in the OSSArcFlow project to improve our digital preservation workflows and discoverability.
• We’re going to be the home base for the Harvey Memories Project. This multi-institutional group will working to document the stories, images, audio, and video related to Hurricane Harvey. We will be taking the lead in digitally preserving any donated items.
• We will be making new collections available for research from Audrey Jones Beck, Brochstein, Inc., and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston [CAMH].
• We’ve continued to work with the Chao Center and are expecting new additions and improvements to the Houston Asian American Archive website.
• Starting last year, we began working on our legacy media backlog. Over the past few months, the old floppies and zip disks have been preserved. Soon, our finding aids will contain descriptions of the files contained on that media.

As we complete some of the projects above and add new ones, we’ll update you on the results. Here’s to a great 2018.

KTRU Tuesdays: KTRU Now Online

The KTRU digitization project has taken around two years to complete.

This includes:

• receiving the donated 2-track reel-to-reel player from KTRU and station manager Will Robedee
• getting the unit repaired
• learning how to play and digitize reels with the help of Bill Coxsey and Scott Carlson
• digitizing over 1200 reels, DATs and cassette tapes. Perhaps, 250 reels and DATs were digitized by a vendor.
• listening to it all
• creating metadata for it
• embedding the metadata into the WAVs and MP3s with the help of Scott Carlson
• creating a spreadsheet of Dublin Core metadata so that the audio files could be ingested into our institutional repository with the help of Amanda Focke and guidance from Monica Rivero
• our programmer Ying Jin running a batch ingest

Without further delay, the finished product is here, waiting for you to find it. You’ll notice on the right side, the files have been organized into subjects, including: interviews, news, musician interviews, speeches and lectures, and sports.

This will also be the last KTRU Tuesday post. We hope that you’ve enjoyed it. Now, you can make the discoveries and share them with your friends.

KTRU Tuesdays: Digitization Update

Over the past few weeks, we’ve embedded metadata in all of our WAV and MP3 files. Now, we’re moving on to the next steps.

First, we split up the files into two groups: what can go online and what can only be listened to in our reading, otherwise known as nearline.

Second, we’re currently working on addressing the needs of these two groups. For the online files, we are creating a massive Excel document that will hold all of the Dublin Core metadata that our institutional repository will need. For nearline, we are following our standard preservation procedures for handling digital files, which in this case is creating an AIP. This part of the process will take a few weeks and lots of patience.

After the second step is complete, we’ll be moving on to uploading all of the online files to the institutional repository (scholarship.rice.edu). It will be quite exciting.

KTRU Tuesdays: KPFT Bombing

KPFT has been in the news lately with a staff shake-up. While the KTRU archives recount the KPFT Pacifica strike dating from 1971, today we’d like to highlight the news reports surrounding the KPFT bombing by the KKK in 1970 and its aftermath. What follows is a series of news accounts from KTRU, usually featuring KPFT’s station manager Larry Lee, which document the aftermath, the Houston Police Department’s response, as well as the role of the FBI.

Image from: The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 58, No. 6, Ed. 1 Thursday, October 8, 1970

KTRU Tuesdays: Digitization Update

Last week all of the KTRU files finished their next phase of transformation. Both the master files (WAV) and the access files (MP3) have embedded metadata. While the metadata that each format accepts varies, each file has a title, date, and other relevant information within the file.

For example, if you play a music CD on your computer, embedded metadata tells the computer the name, artist, and duration for each song file. The same is true for KTRU’s digital files, but the WAV files contain a bit more information like detailed descriptions.

How did we do it? First, we used an open source software called BWF MetaEdit for embedding information into the WAVs. Our metadata coordinator, Scott Carlson created some Excel spreadsheets that helped make the embedding process easier and more automated.

For MP3s, we used a Python script that Scott wrote. He was unable to find a reliable open source software to write metadata to MP3s, so he created his own. It also helped automate the process. If any of this doesn’t make sense, there was a lot of copying and pasting of information involved.

Why do this? If we didn’t embed metadata, the files would have no information beyond a the file name. Embedding metadata ensures that 10 years down the line, the file can tell its story.

What’s next? All of the WAVs and MP3s will be sorted into what can go online and what cannot go online, but will be nearline (can only be listened to in the reading room). After that, we will need to use our old metadata and create some new metadata to prepare items to go in the institutional repository (scholarship.rice.edu).

KTRU Tuesdays: Streaking

On the 1974 News Master 4, there are two brief stories about the changing sexual mores at Rice University. The first is an academic take, while the second is about planning a streak-off with the University of Houston.

Streaking has not disappeared from campus. A form of streaking lives on at Rice under the name Baker 13.

Read more about Rice’s obsession with streaking in 1974.

Image from: The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 61, No. 23, Ed. 1 Thursday, March 7, 1974

KTRU Tuesdays: Hackerman on Russia

Almost 35 years ago, Pres. Norman Hackerman spoke about safeguarding U.S. academic intelligence from Russia. This is from the June 9, 1982 edition of “To the Point” with Scott Hochberg.

Image from: “Dr. Norman Hackerman, at desk with stacks of files, Rice University.” (1971) Rice University: http://hdl.handle.net/1911/75273

KTRU Tuesdays: Summer Renovations

For anyone on campus during the summer, the university is bustling with renovations. For example, the old section of Brown College is going through a second phase of summer renovations.

Above is the audio from an unidentified man explaining the 1971 summer renovations. Carpeted hallways in the colleges sound like a horrible idea. Was it red like the carpet in the college’s commons ca. 1975?

Image from: “Intramural table tennis match in the Baker College Commons, Rice University.” (1975) Rice University: http://hdl.handle.net/1911/79661.