Time has taken many things: customs, technologies, even forms of entertainment. Entire films have disappeared with no known copies or backups. Something similar is happening to audio, but several initiatives are working to prevent or at least delay that natural destruction. One of them is Unlocked Recordings, a collaboration between the Internet Archive and the Boston Public Library. More than 100,000 recordings are waiting to be digitized, and you can already enjoy the first 3,000 records.
The Silent Threat
The concept of the 'lost film' is one of the saddest and most worrying in cinema. Often, the loss happened because of a major event (for example, a fire), but let's not fool ourselves: Time and the fragility of storage media are our main enemies. We recently talked about Project Silica, a Microsoft and Warner Bros. idea for storing information in highly durable quartz crystals. The first experiment yielded excellent results, but we are still far from mass use.
https://old.neoteo.com/the-great-78-gigantesco-proyecto-para-preservar-y-digitalizar-vinilos-de-78-rpm/Rescuing Audio History
Of course, audio is not immune to all this. Vinyl records, magnetic tapes, wax cylinders, celluloid... sooner or later they will collapse. Today, our first line of defense is digitization, and some organizations out there are doing extraordinary work backing up material. At the top of the list is the Internet Archive, which joined forces with the Boston Public Library to back up more than 100,000 recordings stored in that institution.
It all starts with the creation of a precise catalog. The backup is not limited to the audio, but also to the covers and the secondary material that accompanies each recording. The company, the year, the track list, and other metadata are compared and verified using multiple external databases. The digitization itself is carried out by Innodata Knowledge Services, and it's as manual as you imagine: An employee operates 12 trays at once, and it's in real time. Each side of a long-play takes 20 minutes, and the average is expected to reach about ten long-plays per hour.
In other words... the road is long. If you want to access the first 3,000 records, you'll need to visit two sections of the Internet Archive: one dedicated entirely to the Boston Public Library, and the other under the name Unlocked Recordings, with 750 records. We are sure you'll find something interesting there. Enjoy!
Unlocked Recordings: Click here
Boston Collection: Click here
https://old.neoteo.com/discos-historicos-vinilos-digitalizados/
