New IT Student Interns at the Grainger
The Grainger Museum is fortunate to have two postgraduate IT Interns working together at the Grainger three days per week from December 2017 through to February 2018 on a project focused on collection access.
Mengyu Zhou and Zenan (Jason) Zhai are creating a website and virtual delivery platform for the historically significant and extensive folk-song collection in the Grainger Museum. Percy Grainger was a pioneer of ethnomusicology, and a skilled exponent of the new technology available in the early 20th century, using a phonograph in the field to record folk songs directly onto wax cylinders. Grainger’s English Folk Song Collection, for example, includes recordings on wax cylinder of 435 folk songs made between April 1905 and August 1909. The entire folk-song collection on wax cylinders was digitised recently, and the intention is for this audio material to be made widely available through a website that will also link up all associated material in the Grainger Museum collection, such as Grainger’s transcriptions and research notes, programs, photographs of the folk singers and published scores of songs. Jason and Mengyu, who are building on the specifications created by previous IT Intern Runhong Zhao, visited the Grainger Museum offsite store recently as part of their internship to see the wax cylinders and acetate discs ‘in the flesh’ as well as other archival material.