Re: [ARSCLIST] Triage, heroic efforts, and economics

["Richard L. Hess" <arclists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 02:17 PM 5/23/2006, Karl Miller wrote:

> Then...a pianist on my label wrote the school where she got her graduate
> degrees and asked for copies of the recitals. They sent her the master
> tapes...no backups...it was as though they didn't care about the recorded
> history of their school...aren't they required by law to keep
> documentation of the degrees they grant...

I hope she realizes what she has and had them properly transferred to digital.


> I guess one needs to start out by selling the notion that expertise is
> necessary...can an automated tape duplicator tell us if signal loss was on
> the tape, or the result of dropout produced by a buildup of oxide on the
> tape head?

No, but the automated duplicator can flag the dropout and then the 
experienced supervisor can check the tape themselves. I would 
consider monitoring software to profile a tape if it weren't so 
bloody expensive and it's yet another thing to learn.

> Then, as the cylinder project has done so very well...more projects which
> tell people the treasures that there are...but then, with our
> current laws, there is so little that archives can share...the Catch 22.

I think there is a vast pool of recordings out there that your 
discussion excludes that are equally or more in need of preservation 
as they are unique. These generally fall outside of the copyright 
discussions we have been having, although it may not be 100% clear as 
to who owns the copyrights and whether they are even copyrighted. I 
am speaking of tapes like your piano student's and the vast archive 
or oral histories that have been made in many areas.

Much of my volume business is oral histories, not music. People are 
willing to pay to preserve and make these assets accessible. It 
sometimes takes as much or more work to address the failings of these 
tapes than music tapes.

I have seen oral histories recorded 4-track at 1.88 in/s on 5-inch 
reels of 0.5 mil "Triple Play" tape (1800 feet on a 5-inch reel).

There are no copies of most of these oral histories, just as there 
were only masters of your student's piano recital.

Some of these recordings document vanishing cultures, especially 
Aboriginal/Native American (and other geographic areas as well). I 
have done a small amount of that work early on in my business and 
I've consulted with a restorer in Oklahoma or nearby who is doing a 
whole tribe's tape archive.

The 7,000 cassettes and reels stored with nightly relative humidity 
spikes up to 75% at the Cal State Fullerton Center for Oral and 
Public History were copied to two gold CD-Rs with some help from me 
to set things up. I tried to get them interested in adding this to 
their IT infrastructure, but was told it couldn't happen.

While preserving commercial releases is very important as well, 
hopefully additional copies of these survive at diverse geographic 
locations. The material that worries me the most are the single copy archives.

Cheers,

Richard


Richard L. Hess                   email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Aurora, Ontario, Canada       (905) 713 6733     1-877-TAPE-FIX
Detailed contact information: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.