In the early 1970s my dad outfitted his bachelor pad with the a state of the art stereo system: McIntosh tuner, pre-amplifier, and amplifier; a Dual record player; and two huge speakers. He later told me that this system was to be my dowry if/when I were to marry, and I totally believed I’d find a boy who would love me for my dad’s stereo system. My love of vinyl was surprisingly unhindered by my mother’s love of playing Roger Whittaker’s complete catalog on vinyl over (and over and over). It was about 1983 when my dad added a cassette tape player, and it was a constant battle between my parents (for whom the soundtrack to Out of Africa was their first cassette) and me (armed from a recent Christmas gifts including Thriller, She’s So Unusual, and Like a Virgin) for control of the play button.
When we got rid of the TV that looked like furniture and on which only the Lawrence Welk show seemed to tune in, we got a TV that had RCA audio outputs and could be hooked up to the speakers via the cassette deck. The setup was an early adopter form of surround sound that allowed my dad and my brother to watch Top Gun at top volumes. The cassette player was also a cassette recorder, and since the sound was routed out of the TV through the cassette recorder, it took me little time to figure out that I could tape audio off TV. Live performances such as U2 at Live Aid in 1985? Live on Memorex. I later rented Rattle and Hum for $.99 and recorded the entire movie rather than weed the garden to pay for the $13.99 cassette soundtrack (which didn’t have the performance of the song “Bad” anyway). We didn’t subscribe to cable until the early ’90s, and even then my parents paid extra to block MTV … otherwise, I would have recorded my favorite songs through the TV instead of buying the cassette singles.These cassette tapes were occasionally eaten by cars or a younger brother, frequently but accidentally recorded over, and eventually worn out loving but repetitive playback. I learned that you had to make a copy that you’d keep safe and never play — right after that original recording was captured — and a few Christmases later I lobbied hard for a boombox with a high speed dub feature.
Point being … I’m realizing now how much this stuff played into my ever fervent love and fascination with all thing audio and moving image. As Paul Conway notes, the “future of library preservation is in the area of non-book preservation, particularly the care, protection, and digital delivery of audio, video, motion picture, photographic, graphic, and other visual resources.” The fleeting state of these materials pose a crisis, as he noted at the recent Persistence of Memory conference, bigger than the brittle book crisis, and one for which we in the preservation community should be readying.
Well, I’m ready. I can write any number of funding proposals and grants to successfully digitize these extremely fascinating, motivatingly fleeting materials. Just let me know, my digital library repository shipbuilders, what standards, guidelines, and tools we’re using for description and metadata, and I’ll happily create the data. I can get money to preserve the originals, coring unique 16mm film on reels and placing these in vented polypropylene cores and into environmentally appropriate cold storage in perpetuity with an offsite storage vender. I can outsource the digitization and rely on several venders to create expertly digitized surrogates of these fascinating recordings, and I can have them archived and delivered on any number of media formats (digibeta for my archival copies, please, with large and small Mpeg4s for access … and you can deliver that on hard drive). I can even get money to build an in-house preservation reformatting lab for audiovisual materials, and lots of folks are getting lots of money to build cool tools to survey a/v collections (NYU, Columbia) and to guide a/v preservation activities (U. Indiana / Harvard). Just to name a few.
But is my digital library repository ready for all this digitized a/v content? Um, not really. I’ll revisit this topic a lot in this blog over the next year. There’s a real disconnect between a very exciting forefront in preservation (saving and making accessible unique audio and moving image materials) and the digital library gatekeepers who could provide that access and steward that content.
Discuss!
