Seattle Arts & Lectures recently announced a Trust grant they received that will enable them to digitize their audio archives of literary lectures and make them available to the community.
Seattle Arts & Lectures has been around since 1987. In its first season, John Updike, Calvin Trillin, Donald Barthelme, and Louise Erdrich came to town to give talks in the lecture series. Since then, the organization has grown in a bunch of ways—adding several education programs, including Writers in the Schools—but anyone longing to hear those earliest lectures, or any lectures over the years since, has been out of luck.
Now that’s changing.
SAL just received $65,750 from the M. J. Murdock Charitable Trust to make what it calls “long-awaited critical updates” to its technology infrastructure. That includes “preserving and sharing SAL’s rich literary legacy by digitizing our archive of past lectures and creating an online platform to begin to make lectures available to the community,” along with implementing a new website and new ticketing system.
