APSearch: A Search Engine for Historical Sound Recordings

In December 2021, the AGYA Working Group Common Heritage & Common Challenges organized the workshop Access to Waxes in cooperation with the Ethnological Museum Berlin, where the accessibility of the unique and historical audio collections of the Berlin Phonogrammarchiv was discussed from a scientific, legal and technical perspective.

One of the most important results of the workshop was the need to improve the researchability and findability of historical sound recordings from the Arab region, which are scattered across numerous archives.

Matthias Pasdzierny

Many of these collections are located in countries of the so-called Global North and are, therefore, often difficult or impossible to access for researchers from the Arab countries. The discourse on how to deal with the digitization and publication of these collections is, therefore, directly linked to the broader debate on the restitution of cultural heritage and how to deal with the colonial past of Europe and North America.

This workshop was the motivation for AGYA members Prof. Dr. Matthias Pasdzierny and Dr. Nadia Bahra to begin working on an open source, easily findable, and widely available search engine for sound recordings.

Launch of the search engine for sound recordings

The public version of Arab Phonograph Search (APSearch), a search engine for sound recordings of verbal expressions and music from Arab countries, was successfully launched at the IAML Congress 2024 in Stellenbosch, South Africa. APSearch as a metadata harvester and web app provides a multilingual research tool and entry point for musicologists, ethnologists, linguists and other researchers from the humanities to identify sources of these collections, which are scattered across archives and museums around the world. Currently, approximately 27,000 resources from seven renowned public and private collections can be found with the help of this search engine (see https://apsearch.org). The service will be further expanded with the addition of more collections (e.g. British Library, EMI Archive Trust, Lautarchiv HU Berlin). The main aim of this project is therefore: to identify important collections of historical sound recordings in Arab countries and to integrate them into APSearch.

Making historical sounds accessible for the international research community

A major part of the project consists of missions to establish collaborative networks with representatives of archival institutions in Algeria, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, and Egypt. The goal of these missions being to making the metadata of the collections technically accessible for APSearch. In this way, the APSearch service will be considerably expanded and at the same time the international visibility of the participating archives and collections from the Arab world will be greatly increased.

APSearch as a project is centered around open science, since it is about making resources and repositories findable with the help of an international and multilingual open access search engine. The code of APSearch will be published in GitHub, to make it accessible to the scientific community for further improvement. Furthermore, the project APSearch involves resources and methods from musicology, archive studies, digital humanities, ethnology, and anthropology. It not only brings academics together in an international context, but the multilingual nature of the user interface (including Arabic, German, English, and French) means that the service is also usable and attractive beyond the circles of academia and for a broader public.