This article is more than 5 years old.

On Friday, Nov. 2nd, Sharon and I attended the annual conference of the North Carolina Preservation Consortium at the Friday Center in Chapel Hill. The topic of the conference was The Great Migration: Audio Preservation in the Digital Age. The keynote speakers addressed many aspects of preserving audio materials in a time that there are more materials out there than a typical repository can juggle.

Sam Brylawsaki, from the Donald C. Davidson Library at UCSB, gave some practical guidelines for audio preservation, including how to store records and cassettes; they should be put on the shelves vertically instead of horizontally to avoid cracking and breakage from the weight of other materials on top of them. He also stressed to SAVE THE ORIGINALS! Don’t dump them to make shelf space after they’ve been reformatted. Why, you ask? We want to preserve the imperfections which don’t always transfer to the new medium, and more importantly, because most CD’s and DVD’s today are NOT good preservation mediums. They are an interim choice at best, until a better way is developed.

Sam knows his stuff, since he worked for many years at the Library of Congress as head of the Recorded Sound Section in its Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. He is also editor of UCSB’s Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings. He had slides that vividly showed the damage that can be caused by improper storage of materials, as well as the proper types of facilities and storage areas to make sure that originals are well protected.

George Blood, from Safe Sound Archive, gave a very technical talk about Magnetic Tape and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: The Science and Psychology of Audio Preservation for Archivists and Librarians. Mr. Blood has documented over 4000 live events and has recorded and edited som 600 nationally-syndicated radio programs, most of the Philadelphia Orchestra. He has recorded or produced over 100 CD’s, 2 of which were nominated for Grammy Awards.

He discussed the types of originals that need reformatting, such as LPs, 78’s, CD’s, CDR’s, and analog reel-to-reel tapes. He also went into great detail about the scientific structure of sound waves, and how they transfer from originals to new mediums. The reformatted copy usually misses some of the sounds from the originals, which means that we want to save the original as well, for as long as it will last.

Mr. Blood had some audio clips that he played for us, to demonstrated the importance of having a professional recording engineer do the transfer to the new medium, vs. having a grad student undertake the same project. The difference was amazing! The student captured the basics of the audio, but it was clear that much was missing from the final product when he played a piece that had been professionally transferred. Alas, the cost of hiring a professional is many times cost-prohibitive to most institutions.

Some additional resources that were offered were these links: