The Dartmouth Jewish Sound Archive has a unique history and vision. See the article in The Dartmouth of 8/7/03, or the article from the New York Times of November 30th 2002.

This archive grew out of a private collection assembled and digitally restored by Alex Hartov, a professor at the Thayer School of Engineering. The conceptual design of the Archive as a Web site for teaching and research is due to Lewis Glinert, Professor of Hebrew Studies at Dartmouth College.

The Dartmouth Jewish Sound Archive database and Web site were developed as a collaborative effort between Lewis Glinert and Alex Hartov, and Jeff Bohrer and Sarah Horton of Academic Computing. The project was funded by a grant from Dartmouth's Computing Technology Venture Fund.

In its current form (circa 2015), the site was completely redesigned by the folks in Academic Computing at Dartmouth. 

How the DJSA works

We use an Oracle database to store the information about the songs and collections that comprise the archive. We use Ruby on Rails to provide a Web interface to the database.  The audio files are streamed using Kaltura.

A word on how "Social Media" access operates.

In light of concerns for privacy that have resulted from news about Facebook and how it "shared" data with various entities, we would like to communicate the following information:

• When a user requests a facebook login to DJSA, they are informed (by facebook) that “Dartmouth Social Authentication” will have access to  email address, birth date, and location; the user must approve this access.
• All Dartmouth applications that support social login use the same Dartmouth-owned process to authenticate; this process uses the “Dartmouth Social Login” account for all facebook login requests from all applications, the application name (e.g. DJSA) is not exposed to facebook.
• Facebook *may* record logins.  The data that would be available would be: facebook user ID, the application that requested the login (“Dartmouth Social Authentication”) and the application owner (“Dartmouth IDM User”).
• There is no data path from DJSA to facebook; facebook is used for authentication only.
• Your user name or password are not known to us, that is Dartmouth.
• Similar arrangements are in place with Yahoo and Google, the two other options for "Social Media" access.

 Lastly, none of this applies if you login using your Dartmouth NetID, which only students, staff and faculty at Dartmouth have.