Since the advent of sound recording, people have made use of it in a variety of ways. One way in which it was very relevant for archivists and historians is interviews with a variety of people, often retirees or "the first" to do or achieve something in their Town or institution. In some cases, the interviews were left on formats that have become obsolete. They can be difficult to impossible for researchers to utilize. Adding them to your institutional repository, with an accompanying transcript, makes these items far more accessible and useful to researchers.