The recent report from the Council on Library and Information Resources on the impact of its Recordings at Risk program underscores the urgency of preserving vulnerable audiovisual materials. It also serves as a reminder of how fortunate we were to receive a $50,000 award to digitize the reel-to-reel recordings of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, ensuring their long-term preservation and access.

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and Shift Collective recently announced the publication of Preserving Endangered Cultural Memory at a Time of Heightened Risk: Evaluating the Recordings at Risk Grant Program. This report is the result of a two-year retrospective assessment of Recordings at Risk, a regranting initiative that supports digital reformatting of fragile and obsolete audio and audiovisual media. In their report, authors Zakiya Collier, Lynette Johnson, and Gabriel Solís map out a pathway for CLIR to streamline and expand the program.

In November 2018, Special Collections & Archives (SCA) was notified it was one of 16 recipients of a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Recordings at Risk Grant. CLIR provided $50,000 for “Documenting the Evangelical Movement in the United States: Digitizing Baptist State Convention of North Carolina Open-Reel Audiotapes, 1957-1980.” George Blood LP (Philadelphia) reformatted and digitized approximately 1,500 at-risk and rare open-reel audio recordings for SCA. The open-reel tapes document the American evangelical movement and contain presentations by prominent Southern Baptist pastors and church representatives at evangelical conferences and annual meetings of the Convention. The speakers and programs on the tapes document the denomination’s activities and subjects of discussion, ranging from Baptist theology to larger cultural and societal issues. This project resulted in long-term preservation and digital storage for these tapes and broad access to the content through the WFU North Carolina Baptist Portal.

One of the challenges we faced was that our funding did not cover the creation of metadata and descriptive context. While the pandemic provided an opportunity for dedicated time to address this gap, many of us in SCA and ZSR lacked expertise in Baptist history. As a result, we struggled to situate materials within their proper historical context or provide the level of depth and interpretation required for researchers to use the collection. We were fortunate in 2023 to hire Marcia Phillips, our PT Metadata Specialist.

Marcia received her B.A. (History) from Bob Jones University; her M.S. (Education Administration) from Faithway Baptist College; and her M.S. (Historic Preservation) from Eastern Michigan University. She has worked as a historian, archivist, and museum educator for several institutions, including Old Salem. She is currently the Manager of the Martin-Wall History Room at the Davie County Public Library. Marcia has also been long involved with the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina and was previously chair for one of their History Subcommittees. She is married to Dr. Bill Phillips and they have four children.

Marcia reviewed and updated 1,598 metadata records for CLIR and since completing her CLIR assignment, Marcia has applied her Baptist history talents to describing the Biblical Recorder, the official journal of the North Carolina Baptist State Convention published since 1833. She is also providing metadata for the Wayne Oates Papers, as part of a collaborative digital project with the University of Louisville.

Descriptive metadata is essential to enabling researchers to discover and use our Baptist digital collections. Although this work is largely invisible to external audiences, it is fundamental to Special Collections & Archives’ mission of providing meaningful access to our collections.