Observations and Information UA students can visit the Office of Student Computing Resources computer labs webpage for information to view/hear digital audio and video. CCIT staff has reported in the past that the lab in ECE 206 is the best for hearing audio and viewing video. Check the webpage for this lab for details and directions. Take along the headphones to your cassette and music CD players to use with the lab's computers. You can plug the headphones into the soundcard port on the back of the CPU. If you need any help, ask one of the lab assistants. Plug-ins Follow the links to download the latest free plug-ins. Regarding the digital audio and video You will find that the quality of the audio and video used in this website varies. Sometimes the original artifact was old. For example, we somtimes were digitizing from old analog video tapes that may have been twenty to thirty years old. Also, some of the video on this site comes from commercial quality VHS video tapes, but the originals video was shot decades earlier. We are streaming the video to your computers as MP3 files, or are using either Apple's QuickTime or Real. Apple QuickTime and Real are proprietary applications that provide free viewers, sometimes called plug-ins, for Web browsers. You need a recent version of each product to assure the best viewing. Furthermore, the quality of what you see on your computer is very much contingent on running it across high bandwidth network connections, such as the ones on campus or in the Office of Student Computing Resources computer labs, or connections in residence halls. In addition, you need a fairly good computer; components such as the amount of memory, processor speed, video card and monitor play an important part in playing the digital audio and video well. To create the video for streaming to your desktop, both QuickTime and Real use significant compression ratios. In the process, this reduces the size of the window we can reasonably create to display the video and degrades the original quality. The goal and the challenge is to find an acceptable quality that can be sent across the Internet to your computer. Since the audio and video for this website were created in 2000 and 2001, we have made progress at the UA in delivering high quality digital video and audio for U of A classes. We think the audio and video in this website is of good quality and adds value to courses and research. Please let us know what you think by sending an email to prnteyes@email.arizona.edu. The Tucson Meet Yourself festival (TMY) The University of Arizona Library's Southwest Folklore Collection contains the correspondence, financial records, publicity, photographs, slides, and audiotape reels and tape reel transcripts documenting the Tucson Meet Yourself (TMY) cultural heritage festival held from 1974 through 1994. Dr. James S. Griffith, who served as its coordinator from 1974 to October 1994, secured a release from participants which allows for use and distribution of the materials for educational purposes only. An estimated 400 to 500 photographs and slides exist for each year covering every aspect of the festival including booths, artists, musicians, dancers, performances, and volunteer workers. Three hundred twenty-four (324) reel-to-reel tape recordings cover the main stage performances, interviews and workshops. Performances consist primarily of all kinds of ethnic music, but also include the annual corridos competition, fiddle contests, cowboy poetry and storytelling workshops, railroad oral history interviews, personal interviews and workshops. You may also visit the Southern Arizona Folk Arts and Music of the Southwest websites for examples of the people and crafts shared during the TMY festivals. revised 031805 SG |