This article about the Library of Congress'
efforts to preserve the nations historical radio
broadcasts might interest SWLfest folks.
-Ed Cummings
http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2016/07/lcm-saving-the-sounds-of-radio/
Library of Congress preserving the nations historical broadcasts
Saving the Sounds of Radio
July 28, 2016 by <http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/author/eral/>Erin Allen
(The following is a story written by Mark
Hartsell, editor of the Librarys staff
newsletter, The Gazette, for the July-August 2016
issue of the Library of Congress Magazine. You
can read the issue in its entirety
<http://www.loc.gov/lcm/?loclr=blogloc>here.)
The Library of Congress is working to preserve
the nations historical broadcasts
<http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/files/2016/07/3c11716u.jpg>
Herbert Hoover played a key role in regulation of radio broadca
Herbert Hoover played a key role
in regulation of radio broadcasting,
1925. National Photo Company
Collection, Prints and Photographs
Division.
When Wilt Chamberlain smashed an NBA record in
1962 by scoring 100 points in a single game, a
radio broadcast provided the only real-time
account of the Stilts incredible feat.
When Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic,
Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed the nation in the
Depressions depths, Allied troops landed on
Normandy beaches and Babe Ruth called his shot in
the 1932 World Series, radio delivered the news.
For about a century, radio has informed and
entertained Americans. The passage of the years,
however, has left recordings of those historical
broadcasts at risk, victims of deterioration,
neglect, improper storage or just the ravages of time.
The Library of Congress for decades has worked to
acquire, preserve and make those recordings
accessibleefforts that in recent years have increased in scope and scale.
We have an opportunity to sustain this material
and make it available, but its a closing
windowthats the scary part, said Eugene
DeAnna, head of the Librarys Recorded Sound
Section. It takes action now on the part of
archivists, producers and scholars to move us
forward at a faster rate than weve up to now been able to sustain.
Radios Missing Era
By the 1920s, radio was a staple of everyday
life, an unprecedented blend of news and
entertainment, brought to life with voices and
delivered over the airwaves to American homes.
Few broadcasts, however, were captured for
posterityrecording equipment was bulky,
expensive and not especially good. As a
consequence, recordings of broadcasts of, say,
big stars or historic events from the Roaring Twenties are exceedingly rare.
When Lindbergh landed at Le Bourget airport
following his historic trans-Atlantic flight in
1927, announcers broadcast the chaotic scene as
thousands of spectators stormed the field to
welcome him to France. All that remains of that
scene today are black-and-white imagesand
silence. No recording of the broadcast is known to exist.
Thats a common tale: Of the 500,000 or so
recorded radio broadcasts preserved in the
Librarys collections, only about 50 come from
the 1920s. The cultural loss is enormousthe
soundtrack of an era forever missing.
We dont have that initial foundation of radio,
DeAnna said. So much of the early broadcasts
radio and TVjust went into the ether. Theyre gone.
Radio, on Record
<http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/files/2016/07/13475u.jpg>
Radio Towers. Harris and Ewing, Prints and Photographs Division
Radio Towers. Harris and Ewing, Prints and Photographs Division.
That changed in the mid-1930s. Radio networks
flourished, making the recording of broadcasts
economically more feasible. Theapproaching war in
Europe fostereda sense that these momentous
events should be documented for posterity.
Technological progress helped, too: Equipment got
easier to use and the addition of lacquer coating
to aluminum discs improved the recordings sound quality.
The major radio networksCBS, Mutual and
NBCbegan recording most of their daily
broadcasts on lacquer discs and, after World War II, on magnetic tape.
Whether those recordings survived is another
matterand thats where preservationists and
institutions such as the Library come in.
Forty years ago, Congress mandated the
preservation of broadcast recordings in its 1976
revision of copyright law, legislation that
directed the Library to create the American
Television and Radio Archives to preserve a
permanent record of the television and radio programs.
The foremost challenge preservationists face is
the degradation, over time, of the media on which
broadcasts were recorded. Tape is vulnerable to
mold, brittleness and signal loss. The lacquer
coating of discs chips or peels off the aluminum
base. An aluminum ban during World War II
prompted networks to briefly adopt glass-based
lacquer discsan even more-fragile medium.
That problem is compounded, at many institutions,
by a lack of good, climate-controlled storage
that can extend the life of recordings.
The Library stores its collections of broadcasts
in the underground, climate-controlled vaults of
its National Audio-Visual Conservation Center
campus in Culpeper, Virginia. But, DeAnna said,
such storage is expensive and hard to acquire for
many institutions, even larger ones.
Getting these collections scattered around the
country into proper archival storage would extend
the timeline for us to get them recorded to digital, he said.
Saving Sounds of the Past
The Library tries to acquire as many historically
significant radio broadcasts as possible for
preservation its holdings include such major
collections as the Mutual network, the Office of
War Information, Voice of America, National
Public Radio, and Armed Forces Radio and
Television. The foundation of its massive
holdings, however, is NBC Radiothe largest,
richest, most significant collection of domestic historical radio.
For decades, technicians in the Librarys Audio
Preservation Unit have transferred those
recordings from their original, at-risk formats
to other, more-stable media. Today, they also are
converted to digital formats, archived in a
digital repository. Some 30,000 radio broadcasts
have been preserved in these ways.
The Library promotes preservation in other ways
as well, aiding institutions in the preservation
of their own collections, helping establish
national preservation standards and policy, and
generally raising awarenessefforts that have ramped up in recent years.
In 2012, the Library issued a national recording
preservation plana blueprint for saving
Americas recorded sound heritage. An outgrowth of that plan is the Radio
Preservation Task Force, created in 2014 by the
National Recording Preservation Boarditself a
congressionally mandated, Library-affiliated organization.
When considering our radio broadcast legacy,
imagine how we would treasure a comparable
recorded history of the 19th century, how much
our understanding of the Civil War, Lincoln,
slavery and reconstruction would be enhanced,
DeAnna said. This is the perspective future generations will have.
It has fallen to us to secure this vast trove of
fragile discs, degrading tapes and ephemeral
digital recordings in sustainable digital archives before they are lost time.
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