[Maybe OT]British Library National Audit of Sound Collections

[David Cantrell]

On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 05:25:35PM +0100, CJB wrote:

> British Library National Audit of Sound Collections
> 
> At last someone is thinking of the future - but 15 years for there to
> be no hardware to play sound recordings seems a tad short ...
>
> http://missingepisodes.proboards.com/thread/10917/british-library-national-audit-collections

That 15 years is referring to stuff like reel-to-reel tapes, wax
cylinders and the like - media that degrade with time, and playback
hardware that is obsolete fragile museum pieces that hardly anyone is
familiar with, and which by its very use helps to degrade the recording
medium.  The hardware will still exist, of course, but if it's fragile
and the media are likely to break when played back, they might as well
not exist for all the good they do.

And remember, most recordings are made on media that was cheap at the
time. Long-term stability over a period of decades was definitely not a
concern of the manufacturers, nor was it a concern of most of the people
making recordings. I have a small collection of recordings from the 80s
and 90s from unsigned bands, most of whom have gone nowhere. Back In The
Day they would advertise demo tapes in the classified ads in magazines
instead of just sticking everything in bandcamp or soundcloud like they
do now. For several years they just sat in a box. Then I decided that I
needed to digitise them for more convenient playback and also because I
knew that the cassette tapes they were recorded on would be slowly
decaying. So I bought a decent cassette deck, and a few modern
commercial recordings just to make sure I had everything working
properly. The commercial recordings played back OK, so I started feeding
old demo tapes in and transferring them to CD. About half of them had
very serious problems such as the tape getting tangled up, or
stretching. After a dozen or so I just gave up.

It's probable that an institution like the British Library could recover
the content from all those cassettes relatively easily, but even so, it
would be time-consuming and there are probably hundreds of thousands of
cassette recordings that are worth preserving, all of which are slowly
degrading.

-- 
David Cantrell | Minister for Arbitrary Justice

  All principles of gravity are negated by fear
                                            -- Cartoon Law IV