Iowa State makes freely available online almost 1,000 lecture recordings

The marketplace of ideas at Iowa State University became more accessible over the summer with the digitization of 991 audio recordings from Iowa State's Lecture Series.

Lecture Series events are free and open to the public. The Iowa State University Library has for years been digitizing past lectures, according to a post on "Cardinal Tales," the library's Special Collections and University Archives blog.

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• Iowa State gets regents' approval to expand Veterinary Diagnostic Lab that's still under construction
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Most recently, the library over the summer used grant funding from the National Recording Preservation Foundation to digitize and make available online 991 recordings spanning the 1970s, '80s and '90s.

Those lectures were selected "based on their significant cultural, historical, and aesthetic value, as well as timeliness with respect to topics that our country is grappling with today, which include race, gender, and sexuality — just to name a few," according to Cardinal Tales.

"In selecting the content for this project, we join calls across the country to center and magnify these voices and movements, and to affirm ISU’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion," the blog post added. 

The lectures themselves are available at iastate.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1150, while details on the speakers and topics covered are available at https://bit.ly/3EArjtq.

The lectures have also been captioned and can be searched full text or synced with transcripts.

More than 3,000 lectures are also available through the "ISU Lectures Archives" YouTube playlist of the "Special Collections Iowa State University Library" channel.

That's the result of work in 2018 and 2019, supported by the Lennox Foundation, to digitize recordings on optical discs.

Another online Iowa State venture:Iowa State's first ever online winter session, started amid the pandemic, was popular among juniors and seniors

The library has also reformatted 290 reel-to-reel and audiocassette recordings "based on patron requests and available funding," according to the library's post on Cardinal Tales.

"What remains are approximately 1,160 reel-to-reel and audiocassettes and 141 born-digital recordings," according to the library.

More Iowa State news:

• ISU touts some successes amid continued decline in enrollment pre-dating COVID-19. What are the trends?
• Iowa State faculty senate leaders ask Board of Regents for the ability to require masks in classrooms

Iowa universities' funding requests for next year:‘It’s imperative’: Iowa’s state universities request $22 million more in funding from lawmakers

Phillip Sitter covers education for the Ames Tribune, including Iowa State University and PreK-12 schools in Ames and elsewhere in Story County. Phillip can be reached via email at psitter@gannett.com. He is on Twitter @pslifeisabeauty.