 Great. Thank you so much, Mike, everyone, to our first webinar for the course Caring for Audiovisual Material. We're going to be joining us today. It looks like we have a great, a robust crowd. We're looking at 230 and climbing. So feel free to continue saying hello in that chat box. And throughout the session, please feel free to post your questions there as well. We'll hold on to those questions and pose them to our speaker during breaks. And we hope to get to them all by the end of the session today. Fingers crossed. So as many of you already know, this is just one course in our series Caring for Today's Treasures today. We have now concluded six courses this year. If you missed any of those courses or you're just simply interested in going back through the material, everything is archived on the online community from our webinar recordings to resource links. So make sure to check that out. This entire series has been made possible by a Laura Bush 21st-Century Librarian Program grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Service. So we owe a great thanks to them. And we're also bringing time and Mike on board with us today to help with both website and webinar support. And for this particular course, we owe a great debt to the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts for organizing all of our speakers in the materials. And throughout the course, we'll have someone from CCAHA on board to help post your questions since they are by far greater experts on this topic than I am. And today we have with us Dianne Figa, who is a preservation specialist with CCAHA. Dianne, would you go ahead and introduce yourself to everyone and just say hello. Hi, thanks, Jenny. My name, as Jenny mentioned, is Dianne Figa. I'm a preservation specialist at CCAHA. We are a nonprofit paper conservation lab located in Philadelphia, but a few years ago, we put together an extensive traveling program on AV preservation called Erase Against Time. So we continue to be active in at least the education end of that field. We're very glad to be on board with this project co-hosting these webinars for you. Jenny? Thank you so much. So, and Dianne will be posing all our questions to the speaker, so keep them rolling in. So before we move on to that topic today, I just have a few things I need to go through. And I promise in the future these will be much shorter, but if you're joining us for the first time, it's great to get all this basic information about the courses. So as you know, this is just one part of this five-part course. And after today, our next webinar will be Monday, October 21st at 2 o'clock. I mean, you'll log in just as you've done today. So like all of our other courses, you are able to earn a certificate of completion and also a digital credential for participating. And to do so, we just ask a few things from you. The first is that you registered online for this course and that first page of the online registration form looks like this. If this page does not look familiar to you or you did not receive a reminder email, we sent that out on Thursday. There's a chance you may not be registered, so please contact us so we can make sure to get you signed up. Registration really is our only way to track your participation. So we also ask that you complete all five homework assignments, whether you log in live for the event or you watch the recording that will send you. After each live webinar, we'll send you a recording of the webinar link so you can keep up with the course if you aren't able to join us live. The emails will come from Heritage Preservation, so just make sure we're not getting blocked by your spam filter. And again, if you're not receiving our email, let us know. And then the final requirement for this course is to complete all five homework assignments. At the end of each webinar, we'll post a link to that day's homework assignment. We'll email you the link, and you'll also find it on the course homepage. I will note that these are not graded homework assignments, so please don't stress yourself out about them. Our intent was really just to get you thinking critically about the topic, so simply do your best. And everything for this course is due no later than Wednesday, November 6. Of course, you're not required to work towards the certificate, but if you'd like to, make sure you get everything in by that time. I will just quickly say, if you are a certified archivist, that this course is eligible for five continuing education credits, and you can find more information about that on their website. So the course webpage is where you'll find everything you need for this course. Our instructors have compiled an amazing list of resources, and they're still compiling them, so make sure to check that out. You'll also find a PDF handout at the PowerPoint for each webinar. And because for this course, our presenters are using some great images. We've provided just a black-and-white quick print handout, and then also a full-color printout for you guys. You'll also find links to those homework assignments, a transcript of the closed captioning, and as soon as this course has concluded, we'll go ahead and post the webinar recordings to that page as well. I also want to invite you, if you haven't done so already, to join the online community. It's not a requirement of participating in this course, but becoming a member does give you access to the discussion board, which is a great place to continue some of these conversations that we'll be having. Now, if you have any questions throughout the course, please feel free to email us or call us. We're here to help you. And without further ado, let me introduce today's speaker. And again, I promise my intro will be much shorter in the future. So today's instructor is Karen F. Gracie. Karen is an assistant professor at Kent State University, School of Library and Information Science, where she teaches courses in digital preservation, digital curation, and audio-visual archiving. She possesses an MLIS, and a PhD in Library and Information Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, and then MA in Critical Studies of Film and Television from UCLA. Her book, Film Preservation, Competing Definitions of Value, Use, and Practice was published by the Society of American Archivists in 2007. And actually, you can see some of her more recent publications on the course webpage, so check that out. So, Karen, thank you so much for joining us today. I am going to pull this out of the way and hand things over to you. Hi there. Jenny, thank you very much for the very nice introduction. It's really a pleasure to be with all of you today. And also to be able to launch this series on caring for audio-visual media. Very exciting to have something like this available. And I think many of you who are connected know that it is sometimes challenging to get good information about this area, so hopefully this will be a great series for you. And without further ado, I'm just going to get right into it and talk a little bit about audio-visual material and its importance. This is an area that I think cultural heritage institutions have really shifted their attention to. I put up this quote by Paul Conway from just a few years ago where he talks about how if you are familiar, if you are from the library or archival community, you may have heard of that movie and also just this idea of the slow fires in our collections, and then going to deteriorating paper. So Paul is suggesting that our new big challenge is really audio-visual media, particularly acetate-based films, videotape, magnetic media. So hopefully, beginning today, you can start to think about getting a handle on these collections in your institution and taking those first steps if you haven't already. Today is really about getting us started and thinking about what the major problems are, what's the physical composition and vulnerability of audio-visual formats, how can we best limit deterioration through appropriate storage environments and become more familiar with recommended techniques and approaches for care and handling of the materials. So these are some of the biggest issues that we deal with with audio-visual media. First of all, these are primarily becoming non-current or niche formats for many of us. Anything that is in analog form either has become obsolete or is in the process of becoming obsolete or we have had some situations where certain things like discs are coming, record players are coming back and things like that, but they're really not the major distribution media that we once were. Motion Picture Film is another area. Kodak, if you've followed the news, you know that Kodak declared bankruptcy a year or two ago, and most motion pictures are... sorry, theaters, movie theaters are going towards digital projection, which means they're going to be fewer prints being made on film. So we're dealing with lots of material that we're having fewer and fewer to play it. We also have to deal with issues of how are we going to reformat, how are we going to get access to this information that are on these older media. Digital reformatting is obviously what many of us are interested in because it's the way of getting this material in front of more people than we would have if people had to just come to our institution. We have situations where certain media is not even possible to do film to film copying because it's very expensive and decreasing availability of film stock is going to make it very difficult to do that in the future, so we have to start thinking, you know, plan Bs for that. We often don't have that expertise in our institution, so we're very reliant on vendors for conservation and reformatting. And then we also have this issue for some of these media, are they intrinsically valuable? Do we still want to keep some of this material around even though we've reformatted it? Are there things about it that make it still something we want to keep around? And that's something I think it really depends on the media. For example, motion picture film, there's actually lots of things about the container itself that has valuable information, that's on it. So I think all of these issues will come up as you go through this session today and later sessions if you join us for the other webinars in the series. So this is just your outline for what we're going to talk about and cover today. And I just wanted to say many of the things that I'm going to go over today, you're going to have a chance to go into more depth before the later speakers in the series. So for example, if you're really interested in audio, you're going to want to join the webinar that's next Monday. Same thing for video and for film. So definitely come back if you have sort of more specific questions. But we're going to try to cover film, some of the analog audio formats and the analog video formats, specifically magnetic media. So covering what the physical composition and what their vulnerabilities are. And then we'll also talk a little bit about choosing the appropriate enclosures, controlling for the effects of temperature and relative humidity, trying to keep dust out of these materials, magnetic fields, which can be a problem. But you want to make sure that you're not going to erase your magnetic media by doing bad things. And then lastly, this idea of making sure that you have the right equipment and so it's kind of the do no harm philosophy of what can you do with this material and not further harm it. So that's the goal for today. And I will be stopping for questions several times. And I'm going to try to keep an eye out for questions to answer. But there will be several points at which time I'll stop for a little bit. Okay. So first we're going to talk about basically the vulnerabilities of audio visual media. We have several different types of deterioration that we're dealing with. There's the chemical deterioration, which some might call the natural aging process. And that's, you know, over time, there are inherent vices in these materials that will cause them to decompose. For motion picture film, both nitrate and acetate based, you have the hydrolysis reaction. So it's absorbing water from the air and that's causing chemical changes. It's breaking down parts of the object. Similarly, you also have the hydrolysis reaction with magnetic media, causing things like sticky shed syndrome where you start to not be able to play your tapes well anymore or the oxides starting to flake off with acetate discs, sound recordings. Again, you can see this is a common theme of hydrolysis being a problem. So there are certain aspects of many of these materials that will cause them to deteriorate over time unless we do things to stop that. Some of it involves things like controlling the temperature and the relative humidity. We also can have mechanical deterioration that's resulting from stresses introduced by temperature and relative humidity fluctuations. A common example, if you're of a certain age and you ever had a record warp on you, you know, I'm a child of the 70s so this happened to me and probably it's happened to you as well. So those high temperatures can be bad in other ways. And then lastly we may have to deal with biological deterioration, our mold, our mildew, our pests. An example of that for this type of media is wax cylinders which are particularly susceptible to mold because of the material that was used in their manufacturer. So we have to deal with all of those with these media. So we'll start with motion picture film. And in a later webinar we're going to get much more information about motion picture film but I wanted to cover for all of these media the most commonly encountered formats. So there are definitely other formats within motion picture film but the ones you're most likely to run into in your collections are at least in the United States are one of these four flavors. So 35 millimeter film. That has been the film that for over 100 years has been shown in theaters. It's a professional gauge. So I'll try to distinguish between more professional type formats and then the consumer formats. As we go along from analog to digital media we're seeing a lot of blurring of those lines between the two but for many decades there were definitely differences between the formats that professionals used in production versus the formats that consumers used. So 35 millimeter has been used by Hollywood and film producers around the world for over 100 years. It's still out there today. Still being shown in lots of theaters around the world. And the fact that it's still around and it was originally introduced in 1893 is actually kind of amazing. 16 millimeter film. It's kind of, it is still considered a professional format but you're more likely to find those in institutions like schools, you know, anybody who collected film or produced film for industrial uses, educational uses. So up until about the 70s, I might say the 40s through the 70s there were just a lot of 16 millimeter films made and purchased by universities. You do have some people who were creating films, you know, sort of smaller independent filmmakers using 16 millimeter. So that's also a format that's been around for quite a while since 1923. And then you have these other two, the Super 8 and the 8 millimeter and those are consumer formats and the 8 millimeter is actually older and they look very similar. They're obviously, since they're both 8, 8 millimeter they're obviously the same width but if you ever want to distinguish between the two the Super 8, the perforations that run along the side are actually, they're sort of going the different direction. The other films, the perforations are horizontal but the Super 8 ones are more vertical. And the other distinction is often Super 8 film, you could have a magnetic stripe along the other side which could be used to record sound whereas regular 8 millimeter would always be silent. So you'll get much more information from I believe Jeff Martin if you tune in on the 28th of October but I just want to distinguish among those. So here's a little bit more information about film gauges and also the material that these gauges are made out of. So anything before 1951 that's 35 millimeter is at least in the United States most likely to be nitrate. And after 1951 it's more likely to be triacetate. There is a few years of overlap between those two formats. And nitrate is, if you know anything about nitrate you know it's flammable, it's to deteriorate in really bad ways. And it's possible that you could have that material in your collection but if you're a cultural institution that has film and it tends to be later than that you're more likely to have acetate film. So don't get too scared about having nitrate. It really is almost exclusively in the U.S. going to be 35 millimeter before the 50s. So we also have another base that's been used since the 80s called a polyester base and that's very, very stable. And it's not really, it doesn't deteriorate in the same ways that the nitrate and the acetate bases do. 16 millimeter, 8 millimeter, super 8, never use nitrate. Mostly triacetate film. You may find some very early 16 millimeter from the 20s on a slightly different variety of acetate called cellulose diacetate. And that is a film that you really have to be careful of because it will deteriorate very quickly and may have, if you have anything like that it's probably very deteriorated at this point unless it was kept very carefully. Just very briefly to mention there are a few others, what we call smaller gauge films out there that are much less common in the U.S. than they are in other parts of the world but some people do have them. So I'm not going to talk a lot about them but just to be aware that they're out there and they could conceivably be nitrate or diacetate which is fairly unstable film. Okay, so just to go through quickly the differences between the deterioration of nitrate and acetate film there are five stages in the deterioration of nitrate and so it starts out where the image starts to fade and get brown and may start to get a little bit of a smell by stage two. It becomes sticky so you try to handle it and it's sticking to itself. In the third stage it may really soften and start to blister. If you see it on a roll you may start to see sort of honey on the top of the roll. By stage four it's pretty much a solid mass at this point it's very unlikely that you're going to be able to salvage a nitrate film and by stage five it really does disintegrate into dust. So I give some examples of some of these stages here so you can see at the top of the slide something that there's no deterioration. If it starts to go to stage one you start to see the image fade and it starts to brown. At stage three you can see those blisters and that honey starts to form on the top of the roll. By stage four and five you can actually sometimes the film can be more than one stage at a time so it's sort of half stage four, half stage five. Underneath all that brown dust is actually a pretty solid mass so it's in the process of going from stage four to stage five. So really not salvageable at that last stage you may be able to partially copy something off of the roll in stage three or earlier. Now acetate film. So there's diacetate which is that mostly from the 20s and early 30s and then there's triacetate which really was always used for home movies for 16 millimeter after the 20s and then after 1951 for professional film. And the big problem with that is something called vinegar syndrome so that's that hydrolysis reaction I was talking about earlier. And so even though a similar kind of chemical reaction is taking place with the nitrate or similar as the nitrate there are sort of different physical signs of that. So it becomes very, very brittle. The film loses all flexibility. You get a lot of shrinkage where the base is shrinking but the emulsion isn't. So it's actually that's a physical stressor on the emulsion. If we were looking at still film we'd call it channeling and it really is the same thing happening but it just you know on a roll film it looks slightly different. You also have this issue of where the film begins to deteriorate if it gets to that certain point which we call the autocatalytic point. The deterioration will, it can be low grade deterioration for a very long time and then it hits that point and it accelerates rapidly. So in an ideal world you want to be able to address problems with vinegar syndrome early on because as with nitrate once you get past a certain point it's very difficult to do anything with the film. And lastly we have loss of plasticizers which also you know is related to loss of flexibility. So here are our examples. So if you open up a can of acetate foam and it looks like this with all that spoking that's really channeling that's happening where that base is shrinking but the emulsion is not. So at the very end stage of vinegar syndrome you may actually open up and I've seen this myself you open up a can and you just have little shards of film that are filling up the can. That's end stage. There's really nothing that can be done with that film even if you could begin to roll what is still on that reel off it would inevitably shatter if you tried to put it through any sort of viewing equipment or laboratory equipment. So here we just have our graphic of the autocatalytic point. Hopefully this will make things clear for you if you didn't quite follow that earlier. So once it gets there away it goes. Luckily for us we have ways now of monitoring acetate deterioration for both motion picture film and I think also for still film. The Image Permanence Institute has something called acetate detection strips, AD strips. And what you do is you can put those in the can for a couple of days and so they actually have a chemical that's on it so it's specially treated paper that will change color if acid vapor is present. So you put them in the can for 48 hours and then you take it out and you compare the color of the paper to I think they give you a special pencil with the different stages of deterioration on it. So as with nitrate if you're at the lower levels of deterioration you can often do something about it and think about either changing the storage conditions or even doing reformatting. The other thing that you can do to monitor acetate deterioration is use something called the molecular sieve. It's made by Eastman Kodak and some other manufacturers and that's actually sort of a more proactive way of getting rid of the acid vapor as it slowly deteriorates releasing those acid vapors and you can have the molecular sieve absorb those vapors in the can and keeping the film from reaching the autocatalytic point. So we have two great ways. Unfortunately we don't have those tools for nitrate but I argue that many cultural institutions these days acetate is probably the bigger problem because you have more of that material in your collections. So just to conclude the section here on motion picture film if you were to begin to look at your collections this is really sort of the first step is trying to figure out what you have and what condition it's in. And so I just have a short list here of the type of information that you could easily gather you wouldn't need any sort of special equipment for this except for maybe some cotton gloves and a nice clean workspace and you could begin to gather information on things like who is the manufacturer of the film there are clues on the film that help you do this trying to date it using either contextual information you have or there actually is information on the film itself often there are codes that are used you can certainly distinguish whether or not something is black and white or color usually you could probably figure out whether or not there is a soundtrack on the film or whether it doesn't have sound you could measure figure out what gauge of film you have using some of that information that you gather about the manufacturer and the date of manufacture you can often figure out is this nitrate is this diacetate, triacetate or polyester generation this is very important you want to separate, if you have materials that were used in the creation of the film so for example the original negative work prints you want to treat those slightly differently from how you treat your access copies because if you ever want to do any sort of preservation work you want to work with those production materials so it's important to try to distinguish it is challenging if you don't have any expertise to distinguish among do I have an original camera negative or do I have a negative that was used in duplication to create access copies but at least being able to distinguish between negatives and positives is a good first step you can also do an inspection to see if you find any damage this you may actually need to have some sort of equipment like rewinds if you want to roll through the entire film to note are there scratches on this material are there broken perforations is this dirty, are there some sort of contaminants on it you can also try to assess whether or not there is shrinkage there's ways of doing this as well and try to see is there any sort of color fading many of us may have had the experience of seeing what we call pink prints where you see a film and the whole thing is cast in sort of a light reddish color so that would be very easy to spot and make notes about number of splices type of perforations this is more advanced knowledge and I'm actually going to refer you to there's a wonderful publication by the National Film Preservation Foundation that can help you do things like identify different types of perforations and different types of damage so I believe that's on the resource list list for the webinar so definitely there are things that you can do some of which you need no equipment at all for and some of which you need very little equipment to at least get you started there's also a source on the reading list that I think is coming out of the University of Washington called I think it's called Film Preservation Manual Low Cost and No Cost Suggestions to Care for Your Film so even if you don't have the right equipment you can at least get started with some of this and this is a good point I think to stop for some questions Sure, we've definitely had a lot of questions so we're not going to be able to get to all of them and as Jenny mentioned in the beginning I think some of the more specific questions will hopefully be addressed in future webinars so let me see we had Sarah from Southampton, UK had a couple questions on nitrate film her first question was what is your view on nitrate film should we still try to preserve it or do the dangers outweigh the benefits? Yeah, I think that's a really good question I think there's an instinct a fear of nitrate and people just want to get it out of their institution oftentimes there are local regulations on storing this film and so they feel like we can't even have it on the property and so let's copy it and get rid of it as quickly as we can but if you don't have those regulations that you have to adhere to nitrate is amazing as a medium and it's actually something that I think it's worth holding onto for as long as you can obviously there are lots of different factors that go into decision making if it's really important content this is getting back to the I think I made a point earlier about the intrinsic value of things versus is it just a container and I think increasingly we're seeing really good arguments made for how important nitrate was as a medium and a lot of contextual information is often on the object that doesn't get transferred in reformatting so I don't think I have an easy answer but I think oftentimes it is worth it to try to hang on to it some other questions also specifically about the molecular sieves Diane in Albuquerque asked who else and I believe someone else asked as well who else makes them other than Kodak I don't admit that I haven't kept up on this but I'm guessing this is one of those Google search things where if you did it you probably could come up with it they were the first on the market and it's possible that there could be different people marketing in different countries as well I know we have a lot of international listeners today so I apologize this is one of those that I will have to do some investigations and see what else is out there one more real quick question Maricel in Puerto Rico asked molecular sieves can be used for photo negatives as well she means I'm going to assume she means still photos as long as it's an acetate based film I think you can it just doesn't work for nitrate that's I think the main issue I believe it was probably originally developed specifically for motion picture film but I believe it also works for for still photos as well thank you very much sure any other questions there were some more but as I mentioned I think they will hopefully participants can stay tuned okay for future webinars well as people are ready I can move on to the audio part of this so first we're going to talk about wax cylinders and discs and so these are the things that I think people are most likely to run into in their collections in this category so the wax cylinders are the earliest type of sound recordings that we have really this was Edison's this is his brain child back in late 19th century and so before we ever had discs we had wax cylinders 78s were the first disc format and then our LPs that were on vinyl come later and those come in the two flavors there's speed there's the 33 and the third then there's the 45 rpm revolutions per minute so wax cylinders very nifty little things and if you have some in your collection they're just amazing but they're the most amazing things ever because of the way they were manufactured using wax and some other substances they're just incredibly fragile they'll just crack if you breathe on them the wrong way so we have to protect them and hopefully that original housing that you see there that original case is not the best permanent storage for it it's usually made of some sort of acidic paper so you need to rehouse these and the other issue is that it often encourages mold so you oftentimes will open up those wonderful little original cases and then it's all fuzzy inside so definitely these are very vulnerable to humidity changes so both mechanically and chemically we've got unbiological problems as well then we have our analog disc so this is just a slide here that shows you the differences the 78s and the LPs they kind of look similar but the 78s are smaller and they're a lot heavier our LPs those are fairly lightweight because they use the polyvinyl chloride so the vinyl and that is a very lightweight plastic in comparison to the 78s which actually use different materials that's part of the reason why they're heavier and then our 45s obviously a lot smaller, pretty easy to identify the biggest problems for discs are the acetate or lacquer discs they're sometimes called instantaneous discs it's by far the least stable type of disc sound recording so we have an issue with plasticizer that leeches from that acetate coating and you can see this resulting in two different types of residue there's a powder residue that you can see so you can get these little pasty moist mounds that are on the groove surface you also can have palmitic acid so it looks a lot like the powder residue but I think it's more crystallized or dry white specks I think this is one of those issues where you can see a problem you may have to consult an expert to distinguish between the two but I think you can be comfortable in noting that there's definitely a problem occurring I think I had oh there, here's my palmitic acid examples you can see what it looks like you've got that residue across the top of the disc another issue with these acetates they're often used for transcription and one of the biggest differences between that regular commercial releases and the transcription discs are that they often play from the center and you'll usually see in that label in the center it will say whether or not it's playing from the center and many of us might still have a record player lying around but you probably don't have a machine to play these types of discs so this is definitely going to be a situation where you're going to have to consult a vendor that specializes in sound recording preservation the acetates they tend to delaminate basically where the material that's the coating that's over the top of it will separate from inside and cased inside and once delamination happens there's really not very much that you can do to reformat the content of the disc so hopefully you want to avoid that from happening we also have a 78 which are made of shellac and these tend to become embrittled over time and it's all the filler that was used to the interior of the disc sometimes it's made out of organic materials that are susceptible to mold if you have more recent discs they're often made out of vinyl and that's actually amusingly enough is one of the more stable materials that's used for disc sound recordings we don't tend to think of PBC as being stable but in this case it's probably a lot more stable than the shellac or the lacquer discs so it'll if you have high enough temperatures it will degrade but at a much slower rate than the other discs I also threw in our compact discs because I think many people think of compact discs as being a really stable media but optical media we now know is very susceptible to certain types of deterioration and delamination is the biggest problem there so even if I think that probably our sound specialists will have more to say about this in a later webinar but I don't think anybody is really going to recommend that you reformat onto compact disc anymore I don't think that's going to be the way that people are going to be going so if you were going to inspect sound recordings so this is a similar list to what we had with the motion picture film what sorts of information could you record about it some of which you can do just by a visual inspection you can look for things like labels and look at the containers that they're in and try to get some contextual information about them there you can probably figure out with your ruler what the size of the disc is if you're lucky you may have some labeling which will tell you if it's in mono or stereo sound and it's definitely the earlier recordings like the 78s are all going to be mono sound stereo sound didn't come in until after World War II so you can be pretty safe on that if you have early discs to say that it's mono vertical or lateral grooves I didn't mention earlier but wax cylinders actually the earliest wax cylinders that Edison created and eventually manufactured they actually had different grooves than the later discs so this can actually be really important to discern if you're going to have things reformatted later but it's often times not easy to tell just by looking at it what sort of groove you have so this might be a case where you'd have to consult with a sound specialist it's often really a combination of identifying the date of manufacture and who the manufacturer was at the disc whether or not you have vertical or lateral grooves Edison also had a type of disc called a diamond disc that he's continued to use his vertical grooves I'm sorry excuse me lateral grooves Edison did the lateral grooves I said the opposite earlier so if you have an Edison diamond disc it's got the lateral grooves speed if you're dealing with certain types of transcription discs this may be a little tricky to discern but if you have a commercial disc obviously if you have a 78 in your hands that's 78 revolutions per minute if you have an LP that's 33 and then those smaller vinyl discs are the 45 but for our transcription discs so our production remember I made a distinction between production formats and consumer formats our transcription discs were much more likely to be a production format and there can sometimes be you know it's not as standardized so there's a possibility that you could have another speed and if you're lucky it's on the label and if you're not lucky it's not so that would be a case where a vendor might be able to help you out and also I would also refer people to a conservator or a vendor to determine if you have non-standard materials that were used so some of the early you know this is like lots of technologies people experimented with materials early on and it wasn't until later that you start to have standardized materials used for example you know the LPs are pretty much universally the PVC material but some of our earlier 78s can be a whole variety of materials and it may not always be easy to discern that so for both our cylinders and our discs we can also you know we can see some physical damage sometimes the over-recorded versus the under-recorded that would definitely be something that you would need a player to be able to discern and this has to do with the sound levels and so this would be something you would need some special equipment to be able to discern but certainly some of the more obvious damage that's on a disc or a cylinder you could record in an initial inspection okay and now I'm going to move on to the magnetic media this would be our open real tapes and our cassettes and open real tapes until about 15 years ago this was actually the gold standard way to you know master sound recordings and also for reformatting and it's been pretty much entirely displaced by digital reformatting into digital media but we still have quite a few we have lots and lots of these open real tapes out there that we have to deal with so you know maybe you had a reformatting project somebody back in the 80s decided to reformat a bunch of oral histories or something like that onto quarter inch open real tape and so now you have to go back and look and say do I want to reformat this again into digital so the tape can actually come in lots of different sizes and you can have different variations on things like the speed that it was recorded at the size of that real how thick the tape is and the track format that was used so all of these are actually really important to try to discern before you do reformatting hold on there we go this two inch and this one inch analog recording tape these would be if you have these really huge tapes in your collections these are production format tapes so this would tend to be higher quality in terms of the sound recording that's on them and definitely if you have any materials from recording studios or from independent artists who have this sort of equipment you may come across this tape you also may have lots of these things these audio cassettes which are still out there this is one of those formats that still is kind of clean you still can buy cassette tapes in the stores it's not the highest quality recording but oftentimes this is the sole source of recording of events or performances or oral history interviews so lots of important content often on these cassette tapes and the biggest problem people often run across is damage to the case so this is something really easy that you could do to at least until you're ready to do a transfer to digital you can actually replace some of these shells if you have an issue with tape being essentially pulled out of the cassette and tangled up that's a whole different issue but definitely the shell issue that's something you could deal with yourself so let's talk a little bit about the magnetic media, the audio tape what's it made out of the base which can be either acetate or polyester and acetate came first and it's by far the more fragile of the two, polyester really is chemically quite stable so we're going to talk about the acetate first so it's the thing in which the iron oxide where the signal is recorded it's basically supporting that so there's a binder there there's a kind of glue that carries that iron oxide and it also binds it to the base and I also want to mention that you'll see on the slide there that very very early audio tape can also be on a paper base but that's quite rare you're more likely to have either acetate or polyester based tape in your collection so essentially the three things that audio tape are most vulnerable to are the hydrolysis of the binder that's that sticky shed syndrome and that can affect both your open real tape and your cassettes and if you've ever put a tape in a player and you hear a high pitched squeal that is definitely the indicator of the deterioration of the binder and you also in more advanced cases can start to have the magnetic material flake away from the base and so that's a situation where it's much more advanced and more problematic if you have acetate based tape it's vulnerable to the same type of deterioration as acetate based motion picture foam and so it is susceptible to that vinegar syndrome and you'll get that pungent vinegar odor that's the acetic acid and you also may get the shrinkage similarly to the motion picture foam you may also come across problems with mold so you can have that smell of mold or mildew with sort of that fuzzy stuff on the tape so all three of these can be problematic and also I wanted to add that videotape is similar, the only difference is videotape was never made using acetate so it's mostly dealing with the binder, hydrolysis of the binder issue alright so how do you distinguish between if you have acetate or polyester tape one of the easiest ways is to hold that reel up to the light you should be able to see through the acetate tape but the polyester will be opaque you won't be able to see light through that so that's a really quick easy test to do one of the things we want to encourage people to avoid is trying to handle magnetic media on a hub like you see in that image you always want to make sure that it's protected by those flanges there you know I once worked with an audio collection where there were many many of these audio tapes on hubs and you know there was at least once where something bad happened and all of a sudden you had a tangled web of tape you never want to be in that situation ideally so you want to be extremely cautious and make sure that it's always protected by the tape it is very responsive to changes in temperature and relative humidity it will grow under shrink depending on the humidity and so you see here we have our poor reels are no longer perfectly round they're basically being distorted because of high humidity so that's definitely you know if you're in an environment where you don't have good control over these two environmental factors so when you try to play acetate on a player we can start to see that it's not smoothly coming off the reel going around that cap so you can see it's starting to cup it's really difficult to both play and reformat these tapes because it's just not writing smoothly along those tape paths and across the heads so this would be a case if you have fairly ancient acetate that's exhibiting some of these signs of problems like the hydrolysis of the binder the deterioration of the base of the acetate you're going to want to take it to a vendor who can make adjustments to their equipment to try to get the best recording of that off the tape if they can with equipment that you tend to have in your own institution just like a player it's often you can't adjust the equipment so definitely these more advanced staged deterioration cases to a vendor or conservator so this is more about the acetate tape dimensionally unstable very brittle it will tend to break very easily you'll have that vinegar like odor and one of the biggest problems with vinegar syndrome is it has a tendency to contaminate other material so if you start to suspect that something is falling prey to vinegar syndrome you're going to want to isolate it from other types of media because in general having acid vapors that can have a bad impact on many different types of material not just other tapes so if you have a way of sequestering that media in another storage place that would be particularly helpful another problem with acetate is that you can have lubricant failure magnetic media tends to have lubricants built into it and so as it plays it helps the tape run smoothly along the tape path but there's a limited amount in there and once it's gone then it'll be very problematic to play it there's no easy cure for this this would be another situation where you tried to play it and it would make horrible noises in the machine and you would suspect that something is advanced deterioration again that would be your cue to go to a vendor or conservator ok in comparison to acetate polyester I had a lot of things to recommend we don't use these tapes as much anymore because we're all going to digital but it tended to it's not unstable the temperature and the relative humidity rise and fall it doesn't change the shape it's rare to have the lubricants fail it had better fidelity than acetate tape the biggest failing of polyester is if it got caught in the machine it would stretch it wouldn't break it would stretch in some ways that's worse because if you have a track that is laid down on that tape all of a sudden when you try to play it back it's going to be permanently distorted it's not going to spring back so that can be problematic here's just a brief graphic if you have some sort of stress on the acetate more likely to break whereas polyester is more likely to stretch if you're trying to identify what's happening you should have the tape coming across coming off smoothly if it's starting to stick, if it's not coming off smoothly that means it's a possibility that it's got sticky shed syndrome and if you try to play sticky shed afflicted tapes hopefully this slide is big enough for you to be able to see there's little brown flakes that are coming off the tape and that's generally a very bad sign and you don't want to continue to try to play a tape it's in this condition because it could do very bad things to your playback equipment I could clog the heads that are trying to read the signal and once the heads are destroyed on the machine you've essentially ruined the machine so you definitely want to pay very close attention if you start to see any sign of this to stop immediately and not try to continue playing it so as with the cylinders and discs we have a list of things that you can look for if you're trying to do initial inspection some of them you may not be able to assess unless you can play it as we move along in terms of technology the later the technology so magnetic media it's a lot harder to ascertain some of these things without playing it so that is a little bit of it's a little tricky you may be able to read labels, you may be able to do visual inspection but there are certain things you're just not going to be able to fully assess unless you have an opportunity to play it back or a vendor has an opportunity to play it back so I'm actually going to move along with this slide because I think some of it repeats some of the things in the earlier inspection slides and if you have any particular questions on these slides do let me know I may actually take a moment here to take some more questions since I'm looking I see we're about at the 3 o'clock mark so sure we've got a lot and they actually kind of go back to the beginning of this section a few participants had questions about housing for wax cylinders in Massachusetts and Connie in Arkansas both just wrote what is a better housing for wax cylinders that's a really good question I believe that there are some acid-free essentially what you want to do is you want to make sure you're not putting pressure on the outside corners of it I know that people have been working on containers that try to have support from the inside people were even talking about creating glass containers I'm not sure if that ever came to fruition depending on where you live glass storage containers may be a very bad idea if you're in an earthquake country I'm going to have to do a little investigation and see what vendors are out there and definitely we're going we want something inert and I know that there are vendors out there that have created acid-free cardboard containers but there may be other materials as well there were a handful of questions with some specifics about CDs and DVDs I believe we're going to get a bit more into that in the third webinar in the series but one person asked, Flavia asked are gold-coated CDs or DVDs more stable than regular ones? Well, they are from that sort of chemical point of view however the bigger issue to address is how much longer are we going to have players for those CDs we're starting to see computers going away from even having CD players in them some of the more recent laptops like from Apple are not even including those players and so making that sort of investment in what are very expensive media and then you find out ten years later that it's almost impossible to find a player to play them but that's really the bigger issue I think that you have to deal with is the player issue rather than the longevity of the media I think we really are going towards either hard drive storage or a lot of people are starting to look at cloud storage and seeing if that is feasible for them in terms of the costs for long term archival storage particularly for sound and video the sizes of the files are such that it makes much more sense economically to go more towards hard drive or raid storage rather than trying to put something on some sort of the media device like an optical disc so hopefully that answered the question this next question I'll ask one more and then maybe we can hold more until the end but Karen in Maryland asked this might be somewhat related in an ideal world if you could migrate data from a deteriorating media to a more stable one which would you choose polyester or digital is this for the audio I think it was asked during the audio section well I think the field has really made that decision for you I know a very few people who are still reformatting onto polyester they have really made that jump the video folk and the motion picture film folk I think there are some good reasons why we're still clinging onto some of our cassette tape for storage for a little bit longer but I think for audio I don't know of any vendors who are going to recommend that you remaster onto polyester tape they're not making the players and the recorders anymore for one thing they've stopped they've stopped a number of years ago however this does bring up the point of we still have this material in this older format if only to assess the content and to do that reformatting so those players well at least at vendors and conservation laboratories will continue to be around for a while longer for as long as they can maintain the machines but it's really not a good idea I think to remaster onto polyester tape at this point well I guess we are moving on to video now and there are just a ton a ton of formats in video many of them were professional quality formats you might remember from the earlier audio slide it's sometimes hard to tell the difference between two inch video and one inch video and then audio sometimes you have to look at the labeling and even try to play it before you can distinguish among those two but anything that's on a real you can be assured is a professional format there's one or two very very rare early consumer formats that were on open real but most video that is I'd say post let's see mid 80s is going to be in a cassette form and almost all of the consumer formats are going to be on a cassette so there have been over a hundred different types of video formats in west you could probably update that in say 70 years at this point and so many of them look very similar and you're only going to be able to distinguish among them by looking at the width of the tape and looking at the clues that you find on the housing things like who's the manufacturer what is the sometimes there'll be some sort of model number but you know description of it so it'll say like beta cam something like that so that's the easiest way to try to distinguish what you have it's definitely worthwhile to investigate there are a couple of different websites out there that can help you identify videotape formats and so this is one of the nicest ones that I know of this is coming out of Texas so go ahead and take a look at that link when you have a chance and if you have some mystery video formats hopefully after looking at that site you'll be able to tell what they are here I've just showed you I've given you a couple of images that show you how difficult it can be to distinguish for example beta cam which is a professional quality format actually came in two different cassette sizes which corresponded to two different tape lengths so I'll let you guess which one is VHS which is the one many of us are most familiar with that's the one on the lower right yet it looks very similar to the beta cam the 30 minute beta cam tape so that can be very tricky we also have had a multiple city of these consumer formats over the years anybody who had a camcorder in the 80s and early 90s knows that some of these earlier formats like 8mm high 8 and then later digital 8 they all look very similar it's really just in the labeling that you can tell the difference between them there's also VHS VHS so those are the ones you can often play on your home VHS player and then there's sort of a baby version of it called VHSC the C stands for camcorder and some of you if you had a camcorder at that time knew that there was a device that you could put the smaller tape in so that you could put it in your regular VHS player and play it out on television you could see your home videos on the television and then we also have mini DV so this is just a small sampling of some of the formats that you may encounter in your collections video tapes have some similar problems to our later audio tapes on polyester you'll see in the upper left hand corner there is a graphic that shows you the different components of the video tape so sometimes you do have a back coat sometimes you don't but they'll all have that polyester base and then there'll be that magnetic layer where the magnetic particles are in a binder that attaches to the base and then there's those lubricant reservoirs and you'll find that the issues often come up with the deterioration the hydrolysis reaction that results in the deterioration of that oxide layer we also have some images here of some very sad videotapes that have obviously been abused like the one on the upper right there where you've seen the most likely damage from a player that was having some sort of problems and chewed up the tape on the lower, let's see on the right, the lower right you see a tape that has mold or mildew issues there, you can see those little fuzzy specks and then on the lower left this is often true, this is actually an open real tape where there was a problem with the tape pack we want that tape to be smooth all along and if you have misalignment in your player it will not result in a smooth tape pack and I'll have a little bit more about that in a second, but if you were to inspect your videotapes here's some of the information that you'd want to gather about the video, so once again this is a similar list for as we had with the audio picture film, so some of this you can glean from just looking at labeling and containers and other things might be a little harder to discern but you certainly can check the cassette, the casing there to see for damage, you can open up and see at least the beginning of the tape you can use your senses to check for any odors if you have the dirty socks or waxy smell that often is an indicator of binder breakdown and hopefully you'll be able to see if there is any sort of fungal growth there so getting back to the tape pack issue so this is a graphic that will show you what the tape pack should look like it should be coming evenly onto the hub and the flanges on either side should be equal space so that is the ideal if we're having problems with our machine we can have one of several results, we can have what we call pop strands where it's really not linked smoothly at all coming out on either side we can have a pack flip where at some point the tension was different on the player and resulting in part of that pack shifting over against one of the flange or we can have it completely jammed up against one side one flange and all of those are problems and can result when you play later in further damage to the tape we can also have various types of contamination in an ideal world if you want to eat or drink or have anybody smoking around video it's very susceptible to particles even something micrometer particle on a video tape it can scratch and damage the signal and result in what we call a dropout later so we definitely want to control for particulate contamination as much as we can let's see I can stop quickly for questions here and then go into the last section of this we didn't really have any video specific questions except for one that I know will be covered in later so go ahead alright okay so now we can talk a bit about controlling deterioration and damage through our storage environments so first of all you want to choose the right enclosures and shelving and this can be a little tricky for some of our more obscure formats there are certain formats that you can just go right out to one of your regular preservation suppliers and get those containers so for example 16mm film cans or VHS those shells those clamshell type containers you're always going to want to go towards inert material so polypropylene or polyethylene materials some people might want more protection particularly for motion picture film which is very heavy by choosing a metal can I know our folks who are in earthquake prone areas often gravitate still towards metal cans because they provide more protection in the event of an earthquake but you want to make sure that it's non-reactive metal acid free cardboard is out there and is a possibility but I would never rehouse 35mm in an acid free container because it doesn't have enough support for it I wouldn't even do that for 16mm 8mm or super 8mm that's perfect for an acid free cardboard container that's totally fine because it's fairly lightweight you're shelving units you're really going to want to go towards like a powder coated metal unit rather than and this is if you have previous experience with preservation you've probably heard this for other types of materials as well but it's particularly important I think for other visual media now here's a common issue with motion picture storage many production environments or even places like universities and schools if they had a motion picture collection they often bought this vertical rack unit that you see on the left because it saves space and it's very handy and convenient to go in and grab the films however it's a big stressor on films if you have films in the sort of storage for decades it's going to warp the film over time and make it difficult to play back and reformat ultimately so in an ideal world you want to go towards what you see on the right which is horizontal stacking of cans that is the least stressful way to store film reels for magnetic media again polypropylene cases are good if you can find them for your format some of our production formats they tend to come in these very heavy duty cases that may not be the best in terms of the chemical composition but they're often very sturdy and so they will support these larger like one inch video is quite heavy so it's hard to find those newer containers and they don't tend to be as supportive as the original so actually in those situations like a two inch and a one inch video open reel I would actually prefer to keep them in the original containers in an ideal world for your VHS tape you're going to want to get rid of those original cardboard sleeves that they came in because they're very acidic and they're not at all good for the tape so that would be a case where you could make an investment in some new polypropylene cassette containers again metal shelving rather than wood is preferred now here's a little tricky unlike motion picture film videotape actually wants to be vertical so it's kind of like books on a shelf so that's actually the way to support your your video cassette so you're not going to want to stack them horizontally like you did with the motion picture film so just remember they're opposite of one another audio storage we want our discs to be well supported so you can see there there's a nice example on the left if I think those might be 45 discs they're eligible acid free paper sleeves and they're fully supported and fully vertical here on the right we see our open reel audio tape and you see there are very nice acid free containers for those as well that you can probably quite easily find it's your favorite preservation or conservation supplier now we're getting into some of the recommendations for temperature and relative humidity and just to make some I won't go into the particular too much of every single base but essentially motion picture film likes to be cold and it likes to be dry and the colder you can get it the better in some cases for things like color film that's the only way to really retard color fading this is if you have a little bit of film you have the potential to maybe buy a freezer and store it in that way but if you have cans after cans hundreds of cans there is a reality that unless you have lots of money you may not be able to create a whole separate storage facility and keep it at 45 degrees 30% relative humidity or whatever it is so the reality is for many institutions they often will do something in between they'll have multiple types of media in a storage facility and maybe they'll choose something that could be colder but somewhere right in the middle if you look at the I'm actually going to skip over to the videotape the long term storage for that it kind of likes to be in the 50s so maybe if you actually have the ability to create a media storage room and you have lots of different types of formats maybe you're going to go right in the middle of that range so it's not going to be the best for some materials like the motion picture film but it's certainly going to be better than having it be room temperature so it's not going to freeze magnetic media unlike motion picture film which actually would be perfectly happy to be able to freezing magnetic media not at all so we want to keep that a little warmer and going back to the audio you see here it actually does a little bit better at higher temperatures the real to real tapes could probably be a little bit cooler but the discs and the cylinders it can take slightly higher temperatures and slightly higher relative humidity and be okay so acclimatization this is a very important point if you're keeping something in a colder storage facility you don't want to bring it out and just try to play it immediately you're going to want to acclimatize it for a period of several days so I believe the formula is if your storage and operating temperatures are more than 15 degrees Fahrenheit or 8 degrees Celsius colder you need to allow for 4 hours for every 18 degrees Fahrenheit different or 10 degrees Celsius difference so you can work out that math for yourself if that's going to be an issue for you then you're going to have condensation problems and very poor idea to allow that to happen okay particulate matter and other contaminants I think I mentioned earlier dust is not the friend of particularly magnetic media but motion picture film as well so you're going to want to keep things clean as much as possible especially when you're in the process of inspecting and looking at things cotton gloves that's actually a pretty good idea particularly for motion picture film interestingly enough acetate film you're more likely to transmit fingerprints than nitrate nitrate once it's sort of cured and we'll assume that since most nitrates stopped being manufactured about what six years ago it's mostly cured at this point but it doesn't take fingerprints quite as badly as acetate does to protect it as much as same sort of moratorium on no smoking, no eating, no drinking around these materials we often have to deal with past poor handling with our collections and so if you see that there is some sort of past particulate contamination you're going to want to consult your conservator or your vendor about that magnetic fields you don't want to keep magnetic tape away from magnetic fields for example don't stack tapes on top of player equipment or television, things like that you have the potential of affecting that signal that's recorded on that tape and the usual things like don't put these things in the sun motion picture film never, never nitrate anywhere near any sort of heat source because of its flammability so hopefully that one's obvious but we've had some very very sad stories over the decades of fires particularly with nitrate because of poor decisions made by people so we want to be ultra cautious with our handling of nitrate in particular replay and inspection equipment if you have it you want to make sure it's clean as possible and which means oftentimes cleaning it after you use it, every time you use it if you're dealing with material that's actively deteriorating it's likely to leave some sort of residue so for example our sticky shed problems, base deterioration delimitation of discs you're going to want to gravitate towards more gentle inspection methods and equipment where you can so look for things that are known to be easier on materials and I can give you some more direction on that if people are trying to figure out what's a better piece of equipment and also if you can get your hands on professional quality equipment you're going to get better playback and better reformatting whenever you use professional quality equipment for your audio visual media let's see I remember there are still things that you can do without playback equipment you can still look at the first few feet of foam you can still look at the evidence that you find on the container and leaders to be able to identify and evaluate things without attempting playback so don't worry if you don't have playback equipment there are still things that you can do and I think of this last bullet point I've probably made it a couple of times but anything that seems to be sort of beyond your basic capabilities that's when you're going to want to contact your vendor or your conservator and there are lots of vendors out there that can help you that specialize in preservation evaluation of things in preservation transfers and I think I've made it that was fantastic Karen this is Jenny that was great and we have a ton of questions let me quickly pull over the homework assignment and everyone just do your best and we'll review the questions at the next webinar I have all the answers Karen gave me all the answers so I'll let you know what the correct answers is but just do your best we had some polling questions I apologize I completely forgot about those no worries and I'm going to pull over an attendance chat box so this is just for our folks who logged in as a group I just want the name of your group members so we can mark them down as having attended if you logged in with just yourself so you entered your name into the system we got you don't worry about this this is just for our groups and we have about four minutes Jenny choose the best couple of questions sure there were a lot from this last section we had a couple questions about for film storage for the cans vented or non-vented the vented ones are much more expensive but they're fantastic if you can afford them I think the basic idea is that you're not going to get the acid vapor building up in the can and because it's going to be escaping slowly over time you're going to be not reaching that auto-catalytic point as quickly so if you can afford them I recommend them very nice option if you can afford it there were a couple interesting questions to Phillip in New York City and Diana and Madrid were both asking about keeping original sleeves from LPs or 45s for instance whether they should be kept separate in acid-free containers with cross-reference metadata and putting the records themselves inside a polypropylene case I think that's your best solution because you don't want to store them in those acidic paper sleeves permanently so obviously it's a bit of a pain to be doing all of that linking to make sure that you still know which sleeve went with sometimes if there's nothing written on them or maybe you're talking about the covers because there are sleeves and then there are the covers obviously those glorious LP covers you're going to want to keep but those interior sleeves probably you can get rid of unless there's something written on them and then Krista in New York City asked is there a difference between using cotton gloves versus nitrile gloves when handling film that's an excellent question you would definitely go towards the nitrile if you're going to do any sort of treatment yourself so for example if you decided you wanted to buy film cleaner you're going to want to protect your hands and that would be when you could go to a nitrile glove but for just inspection as long as you're not cleaning cotton gloves should be fine I actually know a lot of archivists that take the cotton gloves off for some parts of the inspection for example if you're doing rewinding of motion picture film fairly quickly and you have your gloves on there's a possibility that if there's a broken perforation you could get a snag and then it could further tear the film so I actually know some people who they just go bare handed for if they're feeling along the edges of the film as they're rewinding any breaks or broken perfs so it's not a hard and fast rule but most of the time cotton gloves are okay Alright I'm going to just cut in here so it looks like we are out of time but we do have all your questions we're going to hold on to them and actually we might hold on to them until the end of the entire course just because they think a lot of them will get answered in following webinars but we'll hold on to them if you feel like at the end you still have questions you can always feel free to email us so just a reminder our next webinar is on Monday at 2 o'clock and Karen and Dianne thank you so much and thank you to everyone who logged in today Yes thank you very much Alright everyone have a fantastic afternoon