Between the early 1990s and 2002, Florida Atlantic University's Wimberly Library acquired about a thousand recordings of Jewish music. In 2002 that collection became the foundation for the Judaica Music Rescue Project, founded by Nathan Tinanoff, with the goal of creating a central repository for Judaic sound recordings. In 2005 the project was renamed the Judaica Sound Archives, with Mr. Tinanoff as director. It now contains about 58,000 recordings. In the last half-decade, the project has been receiving material at the rate of more than 10,000 recordings a year. Mr. Tinanoff and the archives' assistant director, Maxine Schackman, jointly answered questions about about it via e-mail.

Q. What kinds of recordings do you seek out?

A. The JSA accepts any recording of Jewish...

The Samaritans of biblical fame still exist, although their numbers are small: The current community, split between Holon, Israel, and Mount Gerizim in the West Bank, numbers just over 700 people. In 1901, a Michigan industrialist named E.K. Warren traveled to the Middle East and was asked to bring home a collection of sacred Samaritan objects for safekeeping. The objects include prayer books and centuries-old versions of the Samaritan Pentateuch, or Torah, which has some significant differences from the Jewish Pentateuch. The collection has been housed ever since at Michigan State University.

In 2007, as a graduate student at Michigan State, James Ridolfo came across an electronic index to the collection. He got in touch with a Samaritan elder, Binyamin Tsedaka, who had been asking Michigan State to “promote Samaritan studies.”  Working with William...

More than 41,000 Spanish-language songs that go back to the early 1900s were placed online this week by the Chicano Studies Center, a research unit at the University of California at Los Angeles.

The recordings are from the Arhoolie Foundation’s Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings, the Los Angeles Times reported. It is the largest repository of Mexican and Mexican-American vernacular recordings in existence. The early works, the archives say, are “the foundation for Latino music today, since the singers and musicians who made these records helped popularize and propagate a number of traditions, including regional Mexican, Tejano, Chicano, and Mexican-American music.”

If you...

Part of an occasional series of conversations about digital archives.

In the early 1860s, Walt Whitman wrote a poem, never finished, called “The Vault at Pfaff’s,” about a New York City saloon where “where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink and carouse.” Those “drinkers and laughers” included creative types like Whitman, the actor and writer Ada Clare, William Dean Howells, and Henry Clapp Jr., whose literary weekly, The Saturday Press, published fiction, poetry, and social commentary turned out by the “Pfaff’s bohemians” in the 1850s and 1860s.

You can find biographies of about 150 Pfaffians and an annotated bibliography of about 4,000 of their literary works at the Vault at Pfaff’s, an online archive dedicated to the...

In the mid-1990s, Ed Folsom, a professor of English at the University of Iowa, and another scholar, Kenneth M. Price, set out to create a digital scholarly edition of Walt Whitman’s works. The Walt Whitman Archive began life as a CD-ROM. Now housed at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where Mr. Price teaches, the archive contains thousands of digital facsimiles of Whitman’s poetry and letters as well as writings about Whitman, and it’s constantly growing. It averages more than 20,000 visits a day from scholars, students, and Whitmaniacs everywhere. Money to keep the archive afloat comes from the co-directors’ home institutions and a series of grants, and an endowment is in the works.

The Chronicle asked Mr. Folsom to chat about how the archive has evolved and where it’s headed. This is...