Introduction
Between 1969 and 1986 my father, Joe A. Harding (biography), served as senior pastor at Central United Protestant Church in Richland, Washington. In the mid 1990s I learned that the Church had several thousand audio tapes, mostly of my father’s sermons, that it was looking to dispose of. My mother and I took possession of the tapes and after sorting out the duplicates ended up with a collection of approximately 600 sermons. In addition we have a four-drawer file cabinet containing all his hand written notes, and rough drafts, as well as typed transcripts for all of the sermons.
While I realize I am hardly an unbiased judge of these things, these materials seem to me to comprise an important archival collection worth preserving. My father was a great preacher. He combined the knowledge of a cultural historian and the craft of a skilled story teller with an insightful, enthusiastic, and optimistic understanding of the message of the gospel. I have heard it said that ones commitment should be to the church, and not to the preacher, and while that may be true, great preaching does make a difference. His inspirational style brought vitality to the church resulting in tremendous growth, not only in membership and weekly attendance but in community outreach and missions.
It has become painfully apparent in recent years that Alzheimer’s is going to keep him from returning to the pulpit, but it is my hope that his legacy, his years of creative work, composing and delivering new and interesting sermons week after week at Central United Protestant Church, will continue to be of worth as a source of both knowledge and inspiration to lay people and other preachers alike.
The Archive Project
In brief, I would like to see father’s sermons and papers managed in a way as to make them available to as many people as possible. I envision an online database where one can search by title, by theme, by scripture passage, or even for keywords within the text of the sermons themselves, and then have the option of either listening to, or reading the message. The hand written notes and drafts may be of more interest to the academic researcher than the general public, but I think it would be worthwhile to preserve them as well. Perhaps some seminary, university archive, or other institution might find the insight they provide into the creative process worthy of study and a valuable resource to the next generation of preachers working on finding their voice, and perfecting their art.
I have set some priorities and divided this project into several phases. The first would be to convert the tapes to Mp3 files, cleaning up the audio and adding basic track data such as title, author, scripture lesson, and principal theme. With those tapes in good condition this can be done fairly quickly. With consumer level software I have found that a tape can be converted, the background hiss removed, the base and treble tweaked as needed and the basic track data added in about an hour. Unfortunately some tapes are worn out from age and repeated listening and need to be physically repaired. Disassembling, repairing and reassembling a defective tape is actually simpler than it might sound (I’ve done it a dozen or more times over the years) but is a little tedious and time consuming. In addition, some of the recordings sound as if the microphone was under a pile of blankets when the tape was made. They can still be restored but will require extra time with the software’s noise filters and equalizers to clean up. I estimate that to convert the entire collection of 600 sermons to Mp3s, cleaned up and archived on CD, will take about 900 hours.
The second phase of the project will be to create a web accessible database where one can search by theme, by scripture passage, or by primary illustration. I have created similar databases for art history images using File Maker Pro and estimate that I could do the same in about 200 hours. The process of making such a database available online would then be relatively simple, but the final form will be influenced by which organization or institution is interested in hosting and maintaining the server.
A third phase would be to supplement the database with text files of the sermons and add a keyword search feature to the database. Most of the sermons were typed and printed for distribution within days of their original delivery. I would now like to scan these sermons, use optical character recognition software to turn them into text files, and then link these texts to the audio files in the database. While I expect most people will be more interested in listening to, rather than reading the sermons, a keyword search of the text could help one to mine the resource more deeply than a simple index of sermon titles. For example, one could search for the name “Job” and receive a list of every sermon which makes reference to Job, not just those where the name Job appears in the title or as part of the week’s scripture lesson. I would tentatively estimate that it would take about an hour per sermon to convert the printed sermons to text files, or about 600 hours in total.
Finally, I think it would be of some value and interest to scan all the notes and rough drafts. This could be done fairly quickly using the batch scanning feature on some modern multifunction printer/scanners. I would estimate all of the documents could be scanned in less than 100 hours. They could then be incorporated into the database within a dozen more hours.
Summary
Overall, I would estimate the entire archive of 600 sermons could be digitized and put into an accessible database with about 1,800 hours of computer time. If I can find funding for this project, I would like to take it on myself. This is work that I would enjoy, find personally meaningful, and am technically equipped to do. While digital audio is not my specialty, I worked as technical manager for the University of Washington’s “Cities and Buildings Database,” and more recently spent four years digitizing photographic archives for projects funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Mellon Foundation as a graduate student at Ohio State University’s Huntington Archive. I have built computers from scratch, built small databases as Art and Architectural History research tools, and once presented a paper on uses of image databases in the study of Architectural History at the 54th Annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in 2001. I would also like to think I have a unique commitment to seeing that my father’s life work continues to work long after he is able to do so.
Bottom line
As much as I would like to take this on as a labor of love I do not have the personal resources to take this project on myself. I could use legal help setting up a 501c3 nonprofit organization to get the project on its feet. I would then like to raise enough funds to at least pay myself minimum wage ($7.63 x 1,800 hour = $13,734) for the main archiving and databasing. Finally, I would like to set up a dedicated website that can be hosted in perpetuity so that people can continue to enjoy my father's creative, inspiring works for years to come. If this sounds like a project you would like to become involved with please contact me at peharding@aol.com, or call 1 509 943 2218.