Utah State Univ (Logan) or Univ of Illinois (Springfield)?

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Utah State Univ (Logan) or Univ of Illinois (Springfield)?

Postby sawasawaya on February 5th, 2010, 1:55 pm

Does anybody visiting this forum have borrowing rights at either Utah State University in Logan, or the University of Illinois in Springfield? Browsing FSI course titles at Net Library shows that those two institutions are veritable gold mines of government-issued FSI audio cassettes. A lot of our missing audio could be taken care of if some wonderful person(s) at either of those locations could step up and earn our undying gratitude. <hint, hint>

If you're not near either of those locations, do not despair! There are other opportunities available! For example, if you would like to provide the audio for Modern Written Arabic Volume 1, you can likely do so if you are near:

US Air Force Malmstrom Air Force Base in Malmstrom Montana, or
the Saint Louis Public Library in St Louis Missouri, or
Ohio State University in Columbus Ohio, or
US Army Aberdeen Proving Ground Library in Aberdeen Proving Ground Maryland (or should that be Aberdeen MD?)
or even if you are near the University of Botswana Library in Gaborone, Botswana.

So many possibilities...

Thank you for your kind attention.
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Re: Utah State Univ (Logan) or Univ of Illinois (Springfield)?

Postby yukalela on February 13th, 2010, 11:53 pm

I have access to Univ of IL library but don't have the time.
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Re: Utah State Univ (Logan) or Univ of Illinois (Springfield)?

Postby matt_1779 on April 16th, 2010, 6:29 am

Well I tried to get some of thier tapes by interlibrary loan, but UofI won't send them. I'm not sure about thier collection, but Cornell sent me the igbo tapes. They might be a place to check out also.
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Re: Utah State Univ (Logan) or Univ of Illinois (Springfield)?

Postby kengle3 on April 26th, 2010, 2:51 pm

I'm a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that gives me access to borrowing from the University of Illinois in Springfield. If you tell me exactly what you want I might be able to help you out.

For example, we have Modern Written Arabic Volume 1 on campus. However, unless I know exactly what you want and how you would like for me to present you with the information I can't really do anything. We have at least 41 FSI language courses at my campus' library.
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Re: Utah State Univ (Logan) or Univ of Illinois (Springfield)?

Postby Oberon on April 26th, 2010, 7:32 pm

OK here are some sound titles that are desired in no particular order that are listed as available from the library:

Greek Basic Unit 34 and 35
Modern Written Arabic (Looks like some tapes might be lost)
Programmed Italian (Units 19+)
Serbo-Croation Vol 2
Kirundi Basic
Fula Basic
Russian, an active introduction
Igbo Basic (apparently not all of the audio files are on the site)
Chinyanja
Cambodian Vol 2
Spanish Basic Vol 4

The following are already on the site,but the sound quality is marginal:
Hebrew Basic
Introduction to French Phonology

Suggested digitizing/encoding workflows:
http://forums.fsi-language-courses.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=51&p=153#p153
http://forums.fsi-language-courses.org/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=63

When I submit, I also send along a picture of the tapes (both sides) to clearly show that they are from the US government and there are no copyright notices of any sort.
Last edited by Oberon on May 15th, 2010, 7:54 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Utah State Univ (Logan) or Univ of Illinois (Springfield)?

Postby sfishman on April 26th, 2010, 7:59 pm

I would realllly like a redone Hebrew Basic Tape. I'm going through it now and it's listenable, but some idiosyncrasies are hard to pick out in the low-quality stream.

Thanks in advance for any work you do for the community
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Re: Utah State Univ (Logan) or Univ of Illinois (Springfield)?

Postby kengle3 on April 26th, 2010, 8:22 pm

I'll probably do Hebrew first, because thats the one I'm going to be studying over the summer.

I'll look into it tomorrow. I'll probably do it one at a time - and with it being the end of the semester I can't guarantee I'll finish a lot of them before summer starts.

I'll first probably try trans coding with a voice recorder since I can just place it somewhere quiet (not by my computer) and it'll automatically be digitized to those settings in the sources above without having to deal with audacity.

How would I go about submitting to the site?
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Re: Utah State Univ (Logan) or Univ of Illinois (Springfield)?

Postby chung on April 26th, 2010, 9:19 pm

kengle3 wrote:I'll probably do Hebrew first, because thats the one I'm going to be studying over the summer.

I'll look into it tomorrow. I'll probably do it one at a time - and with it being the end of the semester I can't guarantee I'll finish a lot of them before summer starts.

I'll first probably try trans coding with a voice recorder since I can just place it somewhere quiet (not by my computer) and it'll automatically be digitized to those settings in the sources above without having to deal with audacity.

How would I go about submitting to the site?


If you have material for posting, send a PM to VagabondPilgrim who is the administrator to figure out the next step. In the end, it is up to him to figure out what gets posted or not because he is the first one on the line if this site were ever threatened by closure for a mistake or oversight concerning what's freely-distributable and public-domain and what is neither.
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Re: Utah State Univ (Logan) or Univ of Illinois (Springfield)?

Postby Oberon on April 26th, 2010, 11:06 pm

I'll first probably try trans coding with a voice recorder since I can just place it somewhere quiet (not by my computer) and it'll automatically be digitized to those settings in the sources above without having to deal with audacity.


What is a "voice recorder" and why does it matter if it is placed somewhere quiet?

The usual technique is to run the line out of a tape player into the line in of a digitizer. I'd recommend digitizing to and maintaining a master copy in some sort of uncompressed format such as WAV or better yet FLAC. It's a royal pain to spend 20 or 30 hours playing back tapes and then later find there was a problem in the MP3 encoding or perhaps to find a new filter that could remove audio noise and all one has left is the lossy M3 recordings.
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Re: Utah State Univ (Logan) or Univ of Illinois (Springfield)?

Postby kengle3 on April 27th, 2010, 7:22 pm

Thats a much better solution, I don't know what I was thinking.

Also I went and got myself access to the main stacks so I now can go check out these items at any time I want. Its actually rather cool in there. =P 10 floors worth of books and collapsible shelving.
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