The lively sounds of Yiddish folk music can often be heard drifting from the office of Alex Hartov, a professor at the Thayer School of Engineering and the founder of the Dartmouth Jewish Sound Archive, an online database of nearly 40,000 songs, broadcasts and interviews that reflect a range of Jewish life. Hartov and Asian and Middle Eastern languages and literature professor Lewis Glinert have worked on the archive's website for the past 10 years.
Hartov and Glinert hope to ensure the various pieces, which include "historical recordings from the creation of the state of Israel and radio broadcasts in Yiddish," are available to everyone who is interested in Jewish culture for both educational and entertainment aims, Hartov said.
"The purpose is not to have a collection that reflects everything about what's out there," Hartov said. "The purpose is to collect things that would otherwise disappear from collective memory."
The archive itself was created in 1992 when Hartov came into possession of a large collection of radio broadcasts formerly owned by his wife's uncle. He first put the recordings online during Fall term 2002.
Today, the collection features content spanning from the turn of the 20th century to the 1980s, according to Hartov. Most recordings have been acquired through personal donations, including one gift of 22 boxes of records from a Jewish community center in Montreal, with 100,000 tracks still waiting to be put online.
Every piece is "exceptional in terms of its historical or musical value," Hartov said.
What first began as a family collection of a few hundred recordings has since become a global resource serving 6,500 users, including cantors, rabbis and students in courses at Columbia University and Rutgers University, according to Hartov. Users of the archive are in places as far away as New Zealand and Thailand wherever there may be an interest in Jewish culture and history, he said.
"When I get a request from someone who's in a faraway country that I think is unusual for our archive, I ask if there's anything they can contribute from the local culture," he said. "In that way, I was able to obtain recordings from France and South Africa."
Hartov partnered with Glinert, who studies Jewish religious texts and modern Israeli society, in 2002.
"He met me right outside [Bartlett Hall] two years ago, stopped me and said, Do you know anyone at [Harvard University] who could take all these records?'" Glinert said. "And I said, No way, it's going to revolutionize my teaching.'"
The College helped support the archive's creation, providing funding as well as technical assistance and legal advice on intellectual property and copyright laws, according to Glinert. In order to follow legal protocol, the archived materials cannot be downloaded. Those outside the Dartmouth community can access the files only with Hartov and Glinert's permission.
"The first place we went before we set this site up was to the College legal office to see what we could do," Glinert said. "It allows us to sleep at night, so we know we're not doing a Napster."
The professors took on different roles in the archive's development, with Hartov serving as technical director and Glinert as cultural director. The archive includes one of Glinert's own recordings, a BBC broadcast about the rebirth of Hebrew as a modern language that features an interview with a native speaker.
"[Hartov's] vision was how to take the sound and polish it up and make it first-rate sound," Glinert said. "My vision was how to use it in a classroom."
The archive has become a tool for professors and students in many courses particularly in French, English, Russian, anthropology and many of Glinert's own classes due to the unique nature of the project, Glinert said. Before the archive went online, Glinert had difficulty finding recordings to use as examples in his linguistics and Hebrew studies classes, he said.
"In those days, YouTube was not even a twinkle in anyone's eye, and other libraries wouldn't send recordings because they were too fragile," he said. "I said to professor Hartov, Let's build an archive out of those recordings.'"
Interested students are encouraged to become involved with the archives as paid assistants, Hartov and Glinert said.
Some students have used the archive for their own research projects, including Daniel Schley '12, a Hebrew studies major who first listened to material from the archives in one of Glinert's classes. Schley subsequently chose to work with the archives as a presidential scholar.
"I'm Jewish, [and] I had a pretty good Jewish upbringing, but I was really never exposed to a lot of the music that was on the website before," Schley said. "A lot of it is very meaningful music." He assisted with data entry and conducted his own research on modern Orthodox music, eventually interviewing artists whose work he had encountered in the archives. Schley, who also plays cello and has long been interested in both Judaism and music, said he enjoyed the opportunity to combine both interests.
"It was a very rewarding experience for me," he said. "If you're interested in Jewish music, this is the place to go."
Rabbi Edward Boraz, executive director of Hillel, said he uses the archives which he described as a "mitzvah" and a "modern-day treasure trove" to inform his religious services.
"This archive is such a necessary piece in preserving the richness of our tradition." Boraz said. "It means that it didn't perish, and the people who wrote those songs, their spirit lives on."
