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Between 1960 and 1985, staff at the Berkeley Language Center (BLC) audiotaped Linguistics colloquia, classes and other public lectures. The catalog of the titles and the reels were only discovered earlier this year in storage at the BLC. This remarkable set of about 140 talks (about 275 hours of recordings) are by many now-famous linguists such as: Bloch, Haas, Chomsky, Halliday, J. Nichols, Watkins, Bright, Martinet, etc. Titles include Noam Chomsky's “Formal properties of simple families of languages," Yehoshua Bar-Hillel's “What price syntactic simplification?,” Mary Haas’ “The Prehistory of Languages,” and Bernard Bloch’s “Postulates for Descriptive Linguistics.”
The Linguistics Department plans to digitize and archive all of these historic recordings in the California Language Archive (http://cla.berkeley.edu/). We are asking for financial assistance to have this work done, as the cost is about $50 per hour of recording. Most talks are only on one or two reels, but several are on 7, 18, 23 and even 27 reels! We plan to acknowledge support of donors with the archived copies of the lectures.
This is the amount needed to digitize one reel of audiotape. Ninety-four talks are on one reel.
Digitize James Matisoff's "Language and Linguistics" which is on 27 reels!
