Keeping The Music Alive
April 21, 2000
University Park, Pa. – A new Web site being designed by Penn State students and faculty will soon become the official Internet presence of Raices, or Roots, the world’s largest collection of salsa, or Afro-Caribbean music, located in New York City.
Raices -- pronounced rye-ee-sis -- is a program of the Harbor Conservatory for the Performing Arts, which in turn is a division of Boys Harbor Inc., a nonprofit educational youth agency in New York City. The conservatory was established in 1970 to train the next generation of musicians who would study and perform the classics of Latin music.
The site will eventually include programming information, materials from the archives, digital songs and images, a glossary of salsa terms, and links to other Latin music home pages.
The students constructing the new site are enrolled in new media and computer graphic design courses taught by Timothy Jackson, assistant professor of visual art, who describes this service-based project as a dream design job and an excellent form of outreach beyond the region.
"This is a great way to train students to work with clients located outside the geographical area and who represent a different ethnic and cultural heritage," he says. "Part of the attraction lies in trying to convey the dynamic spirit of salsa through graphics, typography, and the Internet."
The collection got its start in 1979 when Harbor Conservatory director and musician Ramon Rodriguez and percussionist and arranger Louis Bauzo began seeking educational materials to teach Latin music to students enrolled at the conservatory. They received donations of charts and arrangements of musicians and went on to compile a unique collection of artifacts related to the development of Afro-Caribbean music in New York City from the 1930s to the present. Today many of the 15,000 items are considered to be at risk because of their fragility.
The collection has just been declared an official project of Save America’s Treasures, a White House initiative focused on protecting threatened cultural treasures. The Harbor conservatory has also signed a memorandum of understanding with the Smithsonian Institution, which is the first step in achieving Smithsonian affiliate status for Raices.
Plans are underway to preserve the collection as well as share it with the public–and that’s where Jackson and his students come in, according to Nina Olson, publicity coordinator for Raices.
"In the times in which we live, we must have a Web site," she says. "Tim Jackson impressed us with his sensitivity and his ability to convey technical information in an accessible way. We are glad to have Penn State’s help because it is a leading university with top-notch technology."
Right now Jackson’s students are collaborating to create a visual identity for the collection and setting up the architecture for the interface. This process involves balancing English and Spanish texts within a pleasing design and working with the inherent constraints of the Internet, such as bandwidth and accessibility issues for scholars and the public.
The team leaders in the new media design course, Jenn Milano of Drexel Hill and Nancy Lozupone of Lincoln Park, N.J., say this project is a valuable learning experience that will prepare them and their classmates to enter the graphic design profession.
"Time seemed to go by faster when we worked in a group, even though we spent a lot of time on this design," says Milano, a graphic design major. "We all learned from others and came up with some great ideas."
Adds Lozupone, an integrative arts major, "Keeping the clients’ needs in mind also kept us grounded. Not only does the site have to be bilingual, but it has to be simple because it will be maintained by the organization."
The official opening for the site will coincide with a 30th anniversary fund-raising gala for the Harbor music conservancy on May 18. Jackson hopes to continue the development of this site in future courses.
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Contact: Karen Trimbath, Department of Public Information, at (814) 865-7517 or at
