tonyandkirsten.org

This week I found an incredible resource that anyone desiring to listen to Biblical teachings should check out: discipleshiplibrary.com. This site is in the process of sorting and digitizing around 30,000 messages from the past 50-60 years!!! That is ten times as many tapes as in our tape library. It’s hard to say how many are already on the website, but the number is definitely in the hundreds, and perhaps in the thousands.

Most of these messages come from either the Navigators audio archive or the tape library of the Baptist Student Union at the University of Oklahoma. Many of the teachings are from speakers/authors whose names you might recognize, like Dawson Trotman, Lorne Sanny, LeRoy Eims, Francis and Edith Schaeffer, Robert Coleman, J. Oswald Sanders, Howard Hendricks and A.W. Tozer. The statement of faith for the site seems pretty right-on, and of course with teachings from the sources they are pulling from there should be little worry about questionable theology anyway. (Of course, use your head and evaluate any teaching you might hear against the scriptures themselves!)

Message on the site are available in either MP3 format, or in streaming WMA format. Some messages have .pdf files of notes or outlines as well. The only complaint I have about this site is that they do a stupid operating system/browser check before letting you in. I only had a problem with this on our Linux laptop. At first I got a pop-up error message telling me that because I had a “non-windows or mac OS and a non-compatible browser” their site would not work properly. How silly is that!

To get around the problem, I simply installed the Firefox User Agent Switcher (which fools websites into thinking you have a different browser and OS than you are really using, but doesn’t change anything really about how the web browser works) and the site works perfectly fine, (possibly even better than in IE). There is no reason they couldn’t let a computer running linux with a mozilla-based browser into their site without any user-aget monkey business. I will probably email the webmaster soon and tell them just that! Normally I would advocate boycotting a site with such a silly browser/OS check, but this is such a great resource I would hate for anyone to miss it.

I’ve officially begun a project that I will definitely be working on for at least the next year, and probably longer: Digitizing and archiving Stonebrook’s audio tape library. Hundreds of teachings from the first 30 or so years of our church will soon be available MP3 or audio CD format!

This project has been a long time coming. I’ve known for years that the old audio tape masters won’t last forever (some may have already disintegrated beyond use) and that cassette tape is a dying format. Tony and I have been talking about starting a digitzing project for almost three years (or maybe longer). We had a couple “false starts” with other people potentially doing a lot of the work, but things never seemed to really pan out.

We acquired off of ebay a cassette deck with the appropriate features for the process several months ago, but it just sat in our basement. Finally a few weeks ago I proposed to Tony that I should be the one to do the work. It makes complete sense: digitizing is a lengthy process because it is done in “real time.” If a teaching is 45 minutes long, it will take the full 45 minutes to digitize it. But, it doesn’t require someone to sit in front of the computer for the entire time. The process of digitizing tapes is one of many 30-second to five minute tasks over the course of many hours. Since I am home most of the day with Madeline, this is no problem to fit into my life. I just run downsttairs, pop in a tape, press record on the computer, and set a timer to remind me to flip the tape. The tape gets flipped, and then when the teaching is completed I export it and convert it to the necessary formats. Probably no more than five minutes is spent per teaching.

Eventually all the teachings will be transferred to some kind of data storage server at church, as well as backed up on DVDs. (Isn’t it handy we just bought a DVD burner on sale recently?). It will be a simple process for Stonebrook Media Library workers to burn CDs (or maybe even DVDs) of audio or MP3s for anyone who wants it. In MP3 format, you could have the entire audio library (at least the teachings worth saving) on just a few DVDs! What a resource for individuals or for other churches in our movement.

But, that “entire audio library” thing is a ways off. So far I have only archived about 35 of 3000 tapes! I probably won’t do them all. I mean, do we really need to digitize and preserve all 10 or so different seminars that have been done over the years on finances? Other things are just out of date (like a teaching on using the media effectively from 1987) or have been superseeded by newer teachings (old membership seminars, for example). I’ll definitely do everything that is classic or has historical value, like all the old Herschel Martindale, Jim McCotter and Dennis Clark teachings. I’ll also be striving for breadth of topics, so if some topics only have a small number of teachings that have been done over the years, I’ll just do all of them.

If you have any requests for topics, speakers or specific messages you would like me to do sooner rather than later, please let me know (either in comments or email). As long as I keep accurate track of what I am doing, the order shouldn’t matter. Also, until the “official” system for distributing the MP3s/audio CDs/DVDs of old teachings becomes available feel free to let me know if you would like any CDs or DVDs burned of the teachings I have already done. I also have a growing collection of great teachings I have downloaded from various websites, so let me know if you are looking for teachings on something in particular.