Sound Recordings
The sound recordings in the Fort Valley online collection were taken from disc recordings in the Library's collections. When original discs were unavailable, preservation tapes were used. The analog audio from the discs and tapes was transferred to Digital Audio Tape (DAT) to produce a master source for digitization. Some surface noise and scratching may be apparent on the recordings, since they have not been enhanced or altered in any way from their original state. WAVE, MP3, and RealAudio versions have been supplied for each recording.
The WAVE files were created from the DAT tape at a sampling rate of 22,050 samples per second, 16-bit word length, and a single (mono) channel. The MP3 and RealAudio files were derived from the WAVE files through digital processing and were created for users who have at least a 14.4 modem.
Manuscripts
Manuscript materials were scanned onsite by the NDLP paper-scanning and text-conversion contractor, Systems Integration Group of Lanham, Maryland. UMAX flatbed scanners were used to digitize most of the manuscripts.
Typescript materials were converted to machine-readable form at an accuracy rate of 99.95 percent and encoded with Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) according to the American Memory Document Type Definition (DTD). This DTD is a markup scheme that conforms to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), the work of a consortium of scholarly institutions. The texts of the transcripts have been translated to HTML for indexing and viewing on the World Wide Web.