About the Institute
A charity that runs a workshop
Stento is a registered Canadian charity in the north end of Halifax. We hold 4,180 hours of recorded voice from Atlantic Canada, we run a working audio transfer lab, and we teach people to record their own communities. Seventeen years old, eleven staff, one bench.
What we are for
Recorded voice is evidence, and it is perishable
A photograph survives neglect for a century. A cassette in an unheated attic may not survive another ten years, and a lacquer disc can shed its recording surface in a single play. Meanwhile the people who could explain what is on those recordings are the same people whose voices are on them. Both clocks run at once. That is the entire reason this institute exists.
Consent decides access
The narrator sets the access level, in writing, at the time of recording, and can change it afterwards. No researcher, funder or board member overrides that. It is the only rule we will not negotiate.
Description is care
An undescribed recording is a recording nobody will ever find. We would rather hold sixty well-described collections than six hundred anonymous files, so we budget for listening time.
The method belongs to everyone
Our standards, forms and schema are published openly and free. A community group that never becomes a member should still be able to do this properly.
Nothing gets improved
The preservation master is what was on the carrier, hum and dropouts included. Cleaned versions are made separately, labelled, and kept alongside the original, never instead of it.
Slow is a method
Real-time transfer, one pass, an archivist listening all the way through. We quote honest turnarounds instead of short ones, and we will not rush a fragile carrier for any fee.
Say what things cost
Rates, membership fees and income sources are all published. People trust an archive with their family's voice more readily when they can see how it pays its heating bill.
History
From a kerbside rescue to a catalogue
- 2009
A basement in Dartmouth
A community radio station closed and put its tape library on the kerb. Six volunteers took it home, then spent a year working out what to do with it.
- 2012
Incorporated, and the first commission
Registered as a Nova Scotia non-profit with charitable status. Two waterfront locals commissioned what became Harbour Work, our first catalogued collection.
- 2015
The bench opens
The Preservation Lab began operating with one serviced open-reel transport and a borrowed converter. Fee-for-service transfer has funded the free programmes ever since.
- 2018
A standard other people could use
First edition of Deposit Standards for Community Oral History published under an open licence. Eleven municipalities and four university archives now use it.
- 2021
Kits and a public catalogue
Twenty-two lending kits entered circulation and the catalogue went online, which took the description backlog from a private problem to a visible one.
- 2024
Four thousand hours
The 4,000th recorded hour was deposited: a farm kitchen interview from Kings County, recorded by a field school graduate on a borrowed kit.
- 2026
Five days a week
The listening room moved to full weekday opening with four stations, two of them equipped with hearing loop and captioned transcript display.
People
Eleven staff, six of whom you will meet
Plus five part-time describers and transcribers, and roughly forty volunteers who staff Long Play nights, prepare carriers and check machine transcripts.
Marguerite Doucet
Director since 2017Previously sound curator at a provincial archives for eleven years. Wrote the first edition of our deposit standards and still takes intake calls on Thursdays.
Adeyemi Okonjo
Head of the Preservation LabBroadcast engineer by training, tape restorer by temperament. Services every machine on the bench himself and keeps a parts library for eleven discontinued transports.
Karen Whitfield-Ross
Collections and access leadRuns the description queue, the rights reviews and the listening room. Decides nothing about access that a narrator has not already decided.
Priya Raghunathan
Description and metadata archivistMaintains the schema, trains the describers, and is the reason the catalogue can be searched by occupation and language rather than only by name.
Daniel Roy
Community programmes managerTeaches kit basics across the four provinces, coordinates the twenty-two lending kits, and runs the field school's third day in the field.
Hannah Brake
Finance and grantsKeeps the operating model honest: tracks which fee-earning work is subsidising which free service, and files the audited statements.
Governance and funding
Who is accountable for this
- Legal form
- Non-profit corporation registered in Nova Scotia, 2012. Registered Canadian charity, number 84732 6104 RR0001.
- Board
- Nine directors serving three-year terms, at least three of whom must be active depositors or narrators' family representatives. The board meets five times a year and minutes are available on request.
- Community advisory panel
- Twelve members drawn from partner groups across the four provinces. Reviews access decisions that are contested and advises on collecting priorities.
- Public funders
- Provincial culture and heritage programmes in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador; two federal documentary heritage programmes; four private foundations. No single grant exceeds nine per cent of income.
- Earned income
- Sixty per cent of operating income is earned through lab services, commissioned collections, training and publications. See the income breakdown.
- Reporting
- Audited financial statements filed annually with the Canada Revenue Agency and published in the annual report each July, alongside holdings and access statistics.
Standards and templates
Published openly, free to use and adapt
All four documents are released under a licence that permits reuse and adaptation with attribution. If your organization adopts them, tell us — it helps us argue for the funding that keeps them maintained.
Deposit Standards for Community Oral History
Third edition, 68 pages. Description schema, file naming, packaging requirements and the minimum metadata a deposit must carry.
Download PDF · 2.1 MBConsent, Access and Care
Second edition, 34 pages. Release forms, restricted material, posthumous consent, and withdrawing consent years later.
Download PDF · 900 KBRelease form and metadata templates
Editable release forms in English and French, plus a CSV metadata template that imports directly into our catalogue.
Download bundle · 240 KBReel & Record, volume 14
Annual journal. This volume: describing dialect without flattening it, and the ethics of machine transcription in community archives.
Free to membersPartners
One hundred and eighteen organizations, in kinds
We work with groups that hold recordings, groups that want to make them, and repositories that take custody when a collection belongs closer to home than Halifax.