LC Will Spend $833,000
to Preserve Classic Radio Shows
The Library of Congress will spend about $833,000 to restore deteriorating tapes of classic radio shows such as One Man’s Family, George Gershwin’s performance on the Rudy Vallee Show, and Arturo Toscanini’s symphony concerts, the Associated Press reported December 2.
Traditional recording methods fall short when it comes to long-term preservation, said Sam Brylawski, head of the library’s Recorded Sound Section. Wax cylinders, for example, get moldy and become unreadable, and some early audiotapes begin to “delaminate” in as little as five years, “so we’re moving toward digitizing them.”
The restoration work is part of a larger LC move into audio that includes creation of a registry of culturally significant sound recordings and of a Veterans’ Oral History Project. LC has also acquired a collection of 179 wax cylinders made by Harvard University’s James Madison Carpenter, who recorded some 2,000 songs, ballads, sea shanties, carols, and fiddle tunes in England and Scotland in the 1920s and ’30s. “Those are the basis of our country music today,” said Peggy Bulger, director of LC’s American Folklife Center.
Posted December 11, 2000.
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