Jesse Blog #6: Senator Joe McCarthy: Audio Excerpts, 1950-1954

Senator Joe McCarthy: Audio Excerpts, 1950-1954 - home page

This collection of 35 audio clips, culled from the Senator Joe McCarthy collection, is held and was digitized by the Marquette University of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. These have been posted on the e-Archives website, a portion of the Special Collections & Archives division of the university library using ContentDM.

Selection Decisions:
The audio clips presented here were taken from the archives' expansive collection sound recordings within the full McCarthy Papers. The full collection of audio recordings appear to include over 100 hours of audio, ranging from the 1950's through the 1960's. The "About The Project" notes that this is a small fraction of the total audio available form the collection, yet give no details as to how the excerpts were selected. The clips cover range from 1950-1954, and concern mostly percieved communist threats to the United States, as well as McCarthy's concern about homosexuals working in the state department and other topics. The "about" page acknowledges that some topics discussed by McCarthy are today considered greatly offensive, and that he is still controversial figure in American history.

Metadata:
For each digitized clip, the archives has included a robust metadata set including: title, date, description of contents, keywords/subjects, location of recording, length of recording, original format, reproduction notes, information on location within full collection, and a link to the transcript. The metadata is able to be searched either via text search or year.

Object Characteristics:
The original recordings were digitized from the original 1/4" tape (although wire recordings also exist in the collection). The transfers were recorded in Adobe Audion at CD quality (16-bit/44.1Khz) wav files. These files are delivered in ContentDM via Apple Quicktime. The default action for the audio files is to stream, however, by right-clicking they can be downloaded to the users local computer as a Quicktime mov file. Transcripts are delivered via pdf downloads. Unfortunately, the naming conventions between the mov and pdf files are not standardized, so it would be difficult to keep track of the relation between files if downloading more than a few at a time.

Intended Audience:
From the website itself, it is unclear to who this collection is intended to serve. It would not be terribly useful to a serious reseracher, due to the incompleteness of the audio clips. However, the presence of the clips may serve to lead those wishing to do more complete reserach to the collection, based on the web presence. One group who may find the collection useful would be students of 20th century American history who are reseraching the cold war and it's effects, as McCarthy was a major figure during that era.