According to a university news release, the money comes from the Council on Library and Information Resources with funding from the Mellon Foundation.
“With 733 reel-to-reels and 1,226 audiocassettes containing field recordings, the archive is an in-depth, first-person account of New York state life gathered by museum studies graduate students in rural upstate New York from 1964 through 1980,” the release stated.
“These audio files serve as an important folk culture resource,” SUNY Oneonta Professor William Walker said in a statement. “The recordings capture folk music, oral histories and other interviews with farmers, tradition bearers and rural people.”
Folklorist Henry Glassie was in the first class of CGP students in 1964-65, and some of his earliest field recordings — with a local fiddler and former hop picker — are in the archive, according to the release.
During two decades, the students captured the voices of narrators discussing issues such as rural electrification and changes in farming, especially the blights that destroyed hops production in New York and multiple transformations in the dairy industry that led to the disappearance of small family farms, the release stated.
The collection includes conversations on hog butchering and blacksmithing, country stores, contradances and recorded fiddle music. The recordings and related materials “document significant transformations, largely in rural and upstate communities, brought on by major changes in agriculture, (de)industrialization, depopulation, and immigration,” the release stated.
CGP and Milne will work with audio preservation experts at George Blood LP, of Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, to complete the digitization project.
When the project is complete, CGP faculty and Milne librarians will work to make it accessible to the public. Selected recordings from the collection are currently accessible online on the CGP Community Stories website at https://tinyurl.com/4fc75xv5.
© 2026 The Daily Star (Oneonta, N.Y.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
