After a 2 year effort funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities' "Save the Treasures" program, Stanford University Libraries have produced an online collection containing approximately 300 hours of audio and 80 hours of video. The digital collection has been painstakingly selected and reformatted from over 1700 hours of original analog recordings. In keeping with the educational and public service goals of Stanford University Libraries, the digital archive on this site is being made available without charge to registered users.
Click here to acess the digital collection
"Selecting materials for digital reformatting from the Fuller Collection was a process that involved weighing both curatorial and technical considerations. From the curatorial standpoint, we wished to select materials of scholarly value that would serve the interests of a diverse population of scholars. From the technical standpoint, we had to select materials which could be faithfully and safely reformatted using available technologies, with a minimum of damage to the original recording.
Achieving a balance between selection and production sometimes involved compromise. Some formats in the archive were beyond the scope of our reformatting capabilities. For example, wire audio recordings, which are recorded on a long steel wire not much thicker than a human hair, are notoriously difficult to reformat. The long, thin wire is subject to breaking and tangling, and the quality of the audio itself is often poor. Because of these complications, we did not handle any of the wire recordings in the collection.
On the curatorial side, we chose to reformat materials which featured R. Buckminster Fuller as the main or keynote speaker. We focused on events where Fuller spoke of issues that are of interest to the scholarly public, including housing and architecture, the World Game, geodesics, mathematics, and education, among others. There were some subjects which are of interest to the scholarly public, such as the Dymaxion Car and the Dymaxion House, which were more difficult to represent because of the lack of recordings from the earlier part of Fuller's career. The majority of the recordings in this online collection consist of reformatted audiocassette tapes from 1969-1983 and U-Matic and VHS videos from 1970-1983. Audio reel tapes from 1952-1965 and motion picture films dating from the 1920s up to 1971 are also included."
