The historical nature of JPUA

While its content is relevant and authoritative, JPUA is not a conventional informational Web site. Rather, it is the digital version of an outreach program undertaken in the late 1970s (see Project History). The student must keep this in mind while viewing Web content and listening to the lectures. Cited sources are limited to those available at that time, and while efforts are underway to include additional up-to-date information, the primary course pages still present the original 1980s biographies. The Tips and Discussion Guide pages have also been copied directly from original materials.

While this might seem misleading, it fits our mission to re-create the original project in a new format. Including outright errors, however, is not a part of the digitization plan, and they have been eliminated where they have been discovered. You are encouraged to participate in the editorial process; please send any questions, comments, suggestions, or errors to jpua@touro.edu.

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The digitization process

All aspects of the JPUA digitization were conducted by Touro College Libraries talent with onsite equipment, some of which was purchased specially for this project. To make JPUA available online, the original open reel tapes were converted to digital format. These original recordings were made on 1/4-inch (0.64 cm), 2-track monaural magnetic tape at 7-1/2 inches per second (19 cm/sec) and stored on 7-inch (17.8 cm) reels. The tapes were first brushed clean of dust, then baked in a food dehydrator to remove excess moisture. They were played back on a TEAC A-3300SX tape deck. The signal was run through a Griffin Technology iMic USB Audio Interface via a Monster cable adapter. Adobe Audition 2.0 was used to record and edit raw files. WAV masters were created using 32-bit, 44.1 kHz sampling, from which the end-user RealAudio files were made. More details can be obtained by clicking the "Metadata" links in the individual lectures.

The original 5-1/2 x 8-1/2-inch companion booklets were scanned, passed through OCR software, and edited. This text was transformed into XML files using XMLSpy Home Edition. XSLT stylesheets were then developed to transform this raw content into the course pages on the site. ASP scripts allow us to pass XSLT parameters dynamically and integrate the result with the Touro College Web site.

We welcome questions about our project at jpua@touro.edu.

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