The Athletics Collection, The Joe Longstreth Radio Show, and the story of the Transgender Singing Voice Conference
The IU East Campus Library has two very different, but incredibly interesting collections to highlights. One is new and one is rediscovered, and we also have a new oral history in the LGBTQ+ collection. All these audiovisual collections are accessible in Media Collections Online (MCO). You will need to log in with your IU account to listen to these.
The Athletics Collection
The Athletics Collection is a brand-new digitized collection thanks to IU’s Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative (MDPI). This collection comes from the IU East Athletics Department and contained 126 DVDs of men’s (2006-2017) and women’s (2014-2016) basketball games, women’s volleyball games (2010-2015), and episodes of Inside IU East Sports (2011-2016). These DVDs were digitized over the past year and half and now are all available to view at MCO under the collection title IU East Athletics.
This collection does not have every basketball or volleyball game recorded, but there are plenty of insights into past tournaments and IU East athletes with the Inside IU East Sports episodes, which also highlights athletes and games of other IU East sports as well as interviews with IU East coaches, staff, and faculty. Due to Covid-19, the physical DVDs have not yet been returned to campus, but when they do, they will be returned to the IU East Athletics Department.
The Joe Longstreth Show
Another collection now accessible online due to the IU MDPI is The Joe Longstreth Radio Show Collection. This collection is not new to the archives, but is re-discovered now that the reel tapes have been digitized and added to MCO. The Pal-Item June 2, 2019 “Out of Our Past” feature correctly describes Joe as a modern Renaissance man.
Joseph E. Longstreth was a Richmond native, graduating from Richmond High School in 1935 and from Princeton University in 1942. Joe studied music, philosophy, and classical languages. He served as a pilot and flight instructor during WWII and studied theater in London, Paris, and Rome. He wrote children’s books, acted on and off Broadway, and toured and performed extensively as a classical pianist and harpist. He lived most of his life on his farm estate in Richmond, served on the board of the Richmond Symphony Orchestra, and performed in Richmond for special events. For a brief time in the early 60’s, he hosted a television program on WLWD in Dayton, OH and he had a radio show program on WLW in Cincinnati, The Joe Longstreth Show.
We have 212 recordings from this show now available under the collection title The Joe Longstreth Radio Show Episodes. The program is described by Joe himself as a “variety show,” covering topics on philosophy, music, travel, literature, and food.
Why does the IU East archives have this collection? Good question. The recordings from the show are from the years 1962 to 1963. Joe was a Richmond native and performed at Earlham College and other local venues. Most likely this collection came to us before we officially became IU East, when we were a part of the Earlham College-Indiana University Extension Center and located in the basement of Carpenter Hall on the Earlham campus, and it traveled with us when IU East was established. The reel tapes sat in a box on the archive shelves, with very little information as to what they contained, until they were finally digitized, and we were able to listen to them.
Interview of Danielle Cozart-Steele on the Transgender Singing Voice Conference
This past year, we were able to add a new interview to our LGBTQ+ Archive Collection by interviewing current IU East adjunct instructor of music, Danielle Cozart-Steele. Cozart-Steele organized the first ever Transgender Singing Voice Conference, a conference started in 2017 at Earlham College and occurs every two years.
While Cozart-Steele was a choir teacher at Earlham College, she encountered a transitioning student who wanted to change vocal parts, moving from bass to alto. When researching on how to best train this student, she encountered no literature on working with transgender people on vocal performance. She reached out to other instructors and interested researchers and, ultimately, this started the Transgender Singing Voice Conference.
The interview touches on the topics of voice instruction and vocal performance, allyship, inclusivity, and male to female transition. This interview can be found in MCO under the title of Interview of Danielle Cozart-Steele. You can also link to the interview via our online LGBTQ+ Archive Collection.
All these collections are accessible by logging in with your IU username and passphrase into IU’s Media Collections Online. If you have any issues accessing these collections or have any other questions about the IU East Archives, you can contact archivist Beth South at eabrockm@iue.ed. You can also reach out to the IU East Campus Library with any of your research needs, just Ask Us! iueref@iue.edu or click here:
