 Welcome back everyone. It's so nice to see so many of you logging in today. It looks like we have about 208 and it's slowly climbing, so that's fantastic. As Mike said, please feel free to continue posting in that chat box. Throughout the webinar, please feel free to post questions there. We'll hold on to them and we'll try to get to them by the end of the session. As you guys know, this is just one of many courses in our series Caring for Yesterday's Treasures today. We've now concluded six courses this year. If you missed any of those courses or you're simply interested in going back through the material, everything is archived on the online community from those 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 Services, so we owe a great thanks to them. We're also fortunate to have learning times on board and Mike with us today for this project for 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 and materials. And someone from CCAAHA will also be on board with us throughout the course to help host and moderate all of your fantastic questions. And today we have with us Laura Hort Stanson. Laura is the Director of Preservation Services at CCAAHA. Laura, would you mind saying hello to the audience? Great, thank you, Jenny. Thanks for having us. It's been wonderful to be part of this audio-visual series with Heritage Preservation. And we were delighted at CCAAHA to have been asked. For those of you that might not be aware, CCAAHA, we are a nonprofit regional conservation center in Philadelphia, and we work primarily with paper-based materials, but also do have experience with audio-visual materials. So again, it's great to be here. Thank you. Thank you, Laura. Let's see. So before we get onto the topic, let me just quickly go through some logistics of the course. As you guys know, today is our second webinar in this course. And after today, our next webinar will be this Wednesday at 2 p.m. Eastern. You'll log in just as you've done today. So that's October 23rd this Wednesday. Like all of our courses, you are eligible to earn a certificate of completion and also a digital credential from Credly.com. And to do so, we just ask for a few things. The first is that you've registered. We also ask that you watch all five webinar recordings, or if you're joining us live, that you watch it live. And you should be receiving emails shortly following those live webinars with a link to the recordings. So let us know if you're not getting that. And the final requirement for this course is to complete all five homework assignments. And if you are interested in earning a certificate, those are due no later than Wednesday, November 6th. And so far, 211 of you have completed the first homework assignment, which is a huge number, so keep up the great work. Again, the course home page is where you'll find everything that you need for this course. Our instructors have compiled and are still compiling some really fantastic resources. And recommended readings. You'll also find a PDF handout of PowerPoints, transcripts of our closed captioning, and homework assignments. And you will now see under webinar one, which was Karen Gracie's webinar, a PDF of some of the outstanding questions from that webinar. Karen was kind enough to go back and answer those questions. So if you felt like you had one that wasn't answered, you might want to check out that PDF. As always, feel free to send us questions through email, or feel free to call us. We're here to help you. And now without further delay, I am so pleased to introduce today's instructor, Sarah Stodderman. Sarah is the Collections Care Manager at the Smithsonian Institute Archives, where she oversees its Archives Conservation Services and Historic Photograph Holdings. Sarah's major research interests have been in the area of magnetic media deterioration and preservation management. And she was one of the first among conservators to look at videotape in its object form and has lectured widely on the identification and care of magnetic tape formats. Sarah has also published a paper on the many different types of audio signal carriers for the Association of Research Libraries. So I'm confident to say we're on great hands today. So Sarah, I am going to go ahead and pull my PowerPoint out of the way. Great. And then hand things over to you. Thank you. Well, thank you so much to Jenny, to Laura, to Heritage Preservation and Student Museum and Library Services, Conservation Center. Let's get going. We have a lot to do. So we're going to talk today about the range of recording materials found in sound archives. And our overview is that we're going to first look at media. So we'll look at a lot of different types of media that are found in sound archives. And we're going to be talking about their material characteristics and the deterioration products. Then we're going to be looking at, and then I'll break right there. And we will have time for some questions. Then we're going to go into handling and preservation basics, what you need to know about the environment, housing, handling. And then we'll break again for a little bit for questions. And then we'll go into some resources and survey tools that you can use to help you prioritize different types of materials in your collections for audio materials. So we have an astonishing array of media for recorded sound. And I'm going to try to cover this in 30 minutes. Now why are there so many formats? And you can see here we have things like cylinders, we have discs, we have things like wire, and we have tape. And the reason for this is that in the competitive world of communications technology, even going back to the 19th century, there has been a need by the people who make these materials and by the people who are consuming them for improvements. And from a business perspective, every time there's a new technology, it means that the media becomes easier or cheaper to make. It may become smaller or more compact. It may be easier to ship. And from a consumer perspective, playback technology becomes accessible and less complicated and the market for these materials becomes larger. So with each advance in communications technology, for instance, higher fidelity comes a similar improvement in playback systems. So we'll see with wire magnetic recordings, the playback systems that are used in the early years are quite poor, which is why it is not a successful format initially, even though theoretically it could be a very good quality audio recording. So what we're going to cover is, we will cover cylinders, discs, and magnetic media. I'm not going to cover belts, which are a little obscure. I'm not going to cover magneto-optical or optical media CDs and DVDs. Those materials, especially the optical media, will probably be covered in the more reformatting and digital sections of these webinars. So the very first earliest recordings that are made commercially are cylinders. And they were also made for professional and personal use. And they begin in 1877 when Thomas Edison creates a foil-covered brass cylinder. Now cylinders stopped being commercially produced by 1929, but they were used to some extent in live recordings of ethnographic field notes and also for office dictation, so you may find in your collections cylinders that date past 1930, even up to the 1960s. These materials are grooved recordings, and they're known as mechanical or acoustic recordings, which I'll get into in just a minute. Their materials are made of soft wax, or they are molded, and their sizes vary from being only one and a half inch diameter, one and a half inches in diameter by four inches long to up to five inches in diameter and eight inches in length. And there are many, many manufacturers of cylinders, and knowledge of those different manufacturers are very important to some collectors and connoisseurs, so if you have cylinder recordings that would be something you would want to know more about. So here we're going to do a very brief overview of what an acoustic recording is. An acoustic analog recording is achieved by a diaphragm that can detect changes in atmospheric pressure. So my voice coming across this, I'm speaking into a telephone, there's a tiny diaphragm that essentially vibrates. In contemporary digital phones, it's taking my voice and changing it into an electric pulse. But in acoustic sound, the change in the atmospheric pressure is recorded as a graphic representation of sound waves on a medium such as a phonograph. And the phonograph basically records it in an analogous way. So a stylus senses the change in the atmospheric pressure and records it as a groove on a record. There is no electronic amplification in an acoustic recording. And so, especially with cylinders, the audio recording required a very large horn to capture the distinct air pressure from the musical instrument or voice. And so when you look at this picture of the mountain chief of Montana Blackfeet, he is actually listening to a recording. This horn is amplifying the sound that's coming from a disc that's where my arrow is. And the recording, as the stylus goes around a groove, it is being amplified through this horn. And so this is a graphical representation or depiction of how sound propagates in space and time. An instrument or a voice, an instrument or a voice will push with air pressure, push in space across time. And the frequency is the highness or lowness. And the amplitude is the loudness or softness. And these velocities can be captured mechanically by simply cutting a groove into the medium that is the analog of the sound wave. Okay, so here are some pictures of some cylinder records. Our top left here is from 1886, the Bell and Tainter Experimental Wax Cylinder with a cardboard core. And this is the original box. This cylinder introduced the concept of incising the surface of the wax rather than indenting it. And before 1886, with tinfoil records, the surface was indented. This cylinder right here and this cylinder right here are solid wax cylinders. The one on the top right, the edda phone, and the one on the bottom left is the graphophone. So this is the graphophone right here. Now, these three recordings that I'm pointing at, these are usually original recordings. Or let me say this, unique recordings. So they were not pre-recorded. It's unusual to find a pre-recorded wax cylinder. And so in the first few years of their manufacture, if you were to have one in your collection, you would see that they are an ivory or cream color, and then later years they became colored into a dark brown. On occasion, they were used solely for dictation, and the wax could actually be scraped off to present a new surface for a recording. And these wax cylinders were made of a variety of waxes, resins, soaps, and oils. And they had an addition of colorants, antifungal oils, plasticizers, lubricants, and hardners. So then we have the advent of molded cylinders, which were developed to be pre-recorded medium for music and speech. The earliest ones are from about 1902 or 1903, and they are made of a metallic soap, which is essentially a hardened wax, and they're very fragile, and they can become brittle. About 1912, Thomas Edison created something called the Blue Amberol, which was a very specific type of cylinder. It's actually a nitrocellulose or a celluloid plastic cylinder that has a plaster of Paris core. In that particular recording, the plane time was around four minutes, and it rotated at about 160 revolutions per minute. I think the selling feature of these particular recordings, these Blue Amberol recordings, is that they were considered unbreakable or indestructible, and so that's how they were marketed as being the unbreakable Blue Amberol. Okay, so here are some of the traits and problems with cylinders. If you have cylinders in your collection, you could average the recording time to be around four minutes, but they could be as few as just a few seconds, or 10, 30, 40 seconds. The playback is typically around 160 revolutions per minute or rotations per minute, but it's highly variable. It depends very much on the original instrument that was recording the cylinder, and it depends very much on the particular features that the manufacturer was putting into their cylinders. These recordings are grooved, and the grooved can be either up and down or from side to side. And there are some of the problems with them, is that they can be fragile. The waxes tend to, in a high humidity situation, can promote fungal growth. They can be flammable. They are not interchangeable with one another. They can shrink over time, and the production values of the original recording can be quite poor or inconsistent. Now we're going to move on to disc recordings. The grooved disc, or you can call it a platter or a record, was an invention of Emile Berliner in 1887, and advances over the next 75 years created dozens of sizes or diameters, dozens of rotation speeds, dozens of colors, and promotional interests. Now discs are made either through a master and mother process. This master and mother process is where a recording blank is etched. This recording blank becomes, or is named a matrix, and that matrix becomes the permanent mold, or it becomes the mold for which a permanent mold is created. And then the mold is either cast or stamped into a pre-recorded disc. So that's if you're making multiple published discs. But there are lots of discs out there that are made for an instantaneous process where a stylus cuts a groove in a blank disc and captures a unique moment in time. And there are basically three types of disc materials. Again, this instantaneous discs are usually created of a lacquer or a resin on a rigid core. These also could become matrices. They could be shellac type recordings, or they could be thermoplastic discs. So again, instantaneous discs of lacquer on a rigid core, shellac type recordings, or thermoplastic discs. And in the midst of all this, there are a variety of master recording blank materials and very unusual discs developed for specific markets. So you need to get to know your own collections to see if there are materials that are unusual or unusual discs in your collections. And I'm going to break down these basic types of discs into three playback categories. The 78 RPM, the 33rd and the 33rd RPM, and the 45 RPM stands for revolutions or rotations per minute. And you can get into sometimes heated discussions with audio engineers about whether it's revolution or rotation. Okay, so here's some pictures of some discs. This disc right here is an 1887 Berliner record. It's hardened latex, which is latex rubber which has been vulcanized with sulfur. And so it's also known as vulcanite. These particular types of recordings can be easily malformed with a modest amount of heat. Over here, this disc is known as a shellac disc, and it has multiple formulations, but essentially it's a clay disc with powdered shellac, lamp black, which is kind of carbon, and cotton fibers. And the diameters of these discs can be 7 inches, 10 inches, 12 inches, 13 inches, or 16 inches. And their rotations can be 70, 78, or 30. And these particular discs tend to be fairly stable. And then over here, this is a lacquer or acetate disc. It's called acetate even though the thin film coating of the core is usually cellulose nitrate. And so there's a core of aluminum or glass or zinc coated with this film of cellulose nitrate. And once the cellulose nitrate has hardened, the groove is cut into it. These are also known as direct cut discs, and they can be used either as the matrix, in other words, created as the first recording from which you make hundreds of other recordings, or as a unique instantaneous disc. Again, they may have a core of aluminum, glass, or zinc. Their typical sizes are 10 inches, 12 inches, 13 inches, 16 inches. And these particular recordings have a range of problems from shrinking, peeling, cracking, or embrittlement due to the plasticizer inside the acetate film that sublimates or breaks down and leaves a sticky residue on the surface. Okay, so here we have two more examples of interesting, unique recordings. The one on the left is an aluminum instantaneous disc right here. And there would be a steel needle that would cut the groove into the disc. So this is a unique recording. And over here on the right is a different type of disc. It's a dictation disc, and it's a softer plastic, and it would have the groove cut into it. And this is used in a lot of offices for dictation. And the brand names for this type of dictation disc might be known as Voice Writer, Gray Manufacturing, and Autograph. And Autograph is A-U-D-O-G-R-A-P-8. So they're usually about 12 inches or smaller in diameter, and these are unique recordings. Now we get into a new formulation. We're talking about 78s, which have some other interesting characteristics. I should mention that some 78s, especially the instantaneous 78s, the stylus of the needle actually is put on the recording from the inside out. The groove is cut from the inside out as opposed to the outside in. But when you get into long-play vinyl discs, what we find is much more stable discs that are usually 95% of them are published discs. And on the left here, this is a novelty disc. So it's this sort of transparentized vinyl. And you'll see this with a number of discs in the 60s and 70s where images could be put onto discs and be published as a novelty item. And then we have the microgroove recording. And this one is 45 rotations per minute. It has about 200 to 300 more lines per inch than the 78s. And it requires a stylus tip radius of one millimeter or less. I should say that long LP or long-play discs also have this microgroove recording. But they run at 33 and a third revolutions per minute. And this microgroove, the smaller recording, the smaller in diameter, goes at 45 RPMs. And again, these are typically published discs, meaning that they're not unique recordings. Okay, so here are some traits and problems of discs. 78s are usually less than three minutes per side. LPs usually have 15 to 20 minutes per side. All of these recordings are grooved. Depending on their vintage, they could be vertical grooves or lateral or side-to-side grooves. Our biggest issue with discs are the acetates, which have very serious delamination problems and very significant problems with the lubricant, which comes out and usually a palmitic acid exudates that comes out. And when this happens to these recordings, which are usually unique, we have a very significant problem getting the sound off. Acetates also have glass cores, so that makes them very fragile and heavy. In contrast, these LPs or long-play discs are flexible and fairly robust. Okay, the next type of material that we've got here is magnetic media. And I'll just go to the next picture so that you can just look at these pretty pictures of different types of tapes. And we're going to talk a little bit about the history of magnetic media when it really became viable. We're going to be talking about formats and tape track formation or configurations. There are hundreds or there are tens of formats and multiple track configurations. We're going to be talking about the materials that make up this magnetic media and their stability. So magnetic recordings became viable and were available as early as 1898. There was an inventor named Vladimir Poulsen who created a wire recording. And that's what you're looking at right here. This wire recording is a stainless steel wire. Several hundred feet long. A very thin, hair-thin wire. Unfortunately, the playback equipment for most wires was not very good, was inferior and produced poor sound fidelity, so it didn't take off commercially. In the 1940s, the technology that created the magnetic wire was applied to tape. And that's where we begin to see that magnetic tape takes off. And it was first perfected in Germany in the 1930s and through the World War II years. Allied forces captured samples of the German tapes and tape machines at the end of World War II and brought them to Britain and the United States for development. And so by the late 1940s, Ampex, which is a company that promoted magnetic media and EMI, another company, had developed broadcast quality reel-to-reel tapes. So there we have a first picture of from reel-to-reel tapes. Magnetic recording has spanned the acoustic, electronic, and electronic equipment has spanned the acoustic, electronic, and digital recording age. So the content on any magnetic media, be it reel-to-reel or in a cassette or in a cartridge, can be analog or digital. Okay, so we have on these tapes, we have on our top left here, this looks like a quarter inch audio tape to me. And over here, this is a two inch tape. And this might be, it looks like, actually like this is a two inch videotape. But one of the problems with magnetic audio tape is that frequently it's difficult to distinguish it from two inch videotape. Similarly with one inch videotape, which is down here. The point is that when you look at reel-to-reel tapes, unless you can trust the label on the box, you might be dealing with video, you might be dealing with audio. Over here, this is a paper-based, a paper-based audio tape. So the very first magnetic media was initially put onto a paper base. And I'll talk more about in just a minute about how these things are configured. Okay, so each on a magnetic tape, you won't be able to see the sound exactly, but if you could use a magnetic viewer, and you could actually develop out the tape tracks, what you would see is what you're seeing in this picture. These are tape tracks. And this is what your recording looks like. And so one of the interesting things to think about is that each magnetic, on a magnetic audio recording, you can have full tracks, half tracks, quarter tracks, and so on. And why that's important is that you want to be able to know whether or not the recording you have has multiple tracks on it, and whether or not they are recorded in stereo, whether or not they're recorded in mono, or whether or not what's the recording or the production value that was placed on the tape track. One of the other things that you need to know about audio magnetic media is that the recording speed of the tape can be 7.5 inches per second, and you'll sometimes see that abbreviated as IPS. It can be 3.75 inches per second. It can be 15 inches per second. And each of those qualities actually has a bearing on the quality of the recording. So we have tape tracks configurations that you need to know about your tape, and there's the speed of the tape that you need to know about. So what is magnetic? What is it composed of? Okay, a tape is composed in a cross section of a base, which I'm pointing at right now, a binder, which is this sort of darker gray area, and a pigment. And the pigment are the little tiny dots that are in here. And in addition to the pigment, which is essentially the recording medium, you also have lubricants, stabilizers, and other materials that helps the tape do its job in a playback machine. And also, with a lot of audio recordings, you have a backcoat. And this backcoat is usually composed of carbon and a polyurethane flurry. And it helps the tape go through the playback machine much more quickly. Now in this slide, what you see is that I've labeled the base as polyester. But in fact, for audio recordings, especially early audio recordings, the very earliest ones were paper. From about the 1940s until about the early 1960s, we have a lot of audio tape which is placed onto cellulose acetate. And that means that older audio tapes may suffer from vinegar syndrome. And I'm not sure if any person on the call has ever had, knows what vinegar syndrome is, but I imagine a lot of people are rolling their eyes right now. This is a big problem, not just with film, but it's a problem with audio tapes prior to about the early 1960s. So we have the base, which is polyester, or acetate, very rarely paper. We have the binder, which is polyurethane, and then we have the pigment, which is the magnetic particles, and then we have this backcoat. And what does that all mean? Well, the magnetic component in audio tape is almost always gamma ferric oxide, which is a pretty decent magnetic particle, which will hold onto its magnetic field pretty well. In early magnetic media, or early reel-to-reel tapes, what we find is that the gamma ferric oxide is not as well processed and it doesn't hold onto its signal as well, or it can be easily overwritten. And this is where audio archivists frequently suggest that people rewind or wind their tapes because of something called print-through. The print-through is because the magnetic field from one layer of the tape prints through to the next layer of the tape. Well, the long story short is that it's only going to happen once, and if it's happened, there's nothing you can do to undo it. So winding or rewinding the tape isn't going to help you. And so gamma ferric oxide is basically what we've got as most of your magnetic components. Barium ferrite typically was used in videotape. Now, chromium dioxide was the favorite magnetic component of cassette tapes in the early 1980s. And when you look at chromium dioxide, its early formulations, it probably promoted damage to the surface of the tape. So early 1980s chromium dioxide tapes can be problematic. Then we have metal particle tape, which a lot of digital audio tapes have, and metal evaporated, which are also used with digital audio tapes. And both of these are somewhat fragile, but more because of the binder than the magnetic component. So let's get back to this whole issue of the deterioration. We have the physical structure of the base, the binder, the pigment. And what turns out is the biggest problem with magnetic media is that the binder fails. That's that polyurethane. The binder has a life expectancy of 10 to 30 years. And this is going to be your first thing you're going to do after you're done with this class is you're going to go look up this handbook Magnetic Tape Storage and Handling, which was published in 1995, which will tell you everything you need to know about Sticky Shed Syndrome and why the polyurethane will deteriorate and what it means for your magnetic media collection. Okay. So continuing on with more magnetic media, here we enter into the world or the era of commercial cassettes and dictation cassettes. All of these are magnetic media. They're just presented in different format. And each of these different formats require their own playback machine. And so what we have is not only a problem with the tape deteriorating, but we have format absolescence. So you may see any of these items in your collection. And these are just standard cassettes. This is a micro-cassette over here. It's really, it's very small. An 8-track tape, 8-track tape, and then these sort of strange commercial recordings. As you get into the 1970s and 1980s, some videotape looking cassettes become used for audio cassettes. So you may end up with things that look like three-quarter inch umatics. And I know that you're going to be talking about this on Wednesday. But you may end up with things that look like umatic tapes that are actually audio recordings. So just keep that in mind. And then we move into the era of digital cassettes. So it's still magnetic media. It still is base binder pigment. It's exactly the same. It just happens to be encoded as a digital signal, not an analog signal. And those tracks are now digital tracks. What are the traits and problems for these materials? One of the biggest issues is knowing what formats you have. You need to look at each of your tape types and identify the shape or size of the tape cassette or reel. And each of these formats are specific to the playback machine. And in addition, there are tape track configurations, which I sort of alluded to when we were looking at the surface of the tape and the little tracks. This is essential information for optimizing playback. So again, if you have a full track, you'd want to capture all of the full track. If you have a quarter track, you would want to make sure you were capturing each of those. And that's very important that you understand the difference between each of those track configurations. Again, we have different speeds. So this inches per second is something that you'll see on the back of the containers. A lot, IPS, is you'll see 15 ips or 7.5 ips. And these slower or the three and three quarters inches per second, you're getting less quality than at 15. Another thing that you should know about is that the native format of the digital audio tape, I'll put this down here. The native format of the digital audio tape is 16 bit 44.1 kilohertz. What does that mean? That means that the native format of the digital audio tape, which is magnetic media, is as good quality as the standard for reformatting analog tapes is. So when you guys are all talking at the end of this whole session in a couple of weeks about reformatting, just remember that your digital audio tape doesn't need to be reformatted. It just needs to be transcoded from its 16 bit 44 kilohertz format into a wave file. Not to belabor this, but I do want to describe two things. One is that bit depth or bit is considered the length of the word or the quantity of colors of a sound or of a sample. A kilohertz stands for the sampling rate. That's how frequently the audio is captured by the digital recorder. So at 16 bit 41 kilohertz, you have 16 ones and zeros, and you are sampling at a rate of 44.1 kilohertz. If you were to do that recording for one hour, that's worth about 600 megabytes. Okay, let me keep going here. I want you to know that wire is stable, but it's completely obsolete, and its primary problems are mechanical, so it can tangle or break. And finally, I've already said this, but it's worth repeating. The least stable part of magnetic media is the polyurethane binder, regardless of whether it is analog or digital. And so the life expectancy of magnetic media is 10 to 30 years. We all know we have magnetic media, which is older than 30 years, and it's fine. And we all have examples of magnetic media, which is less than 10 years, which is not fine, and you can't play it back, but that's the rule of thumb. And given that, it's going to be an important part of figuring out what is your highest priority for reformatting in knowing that you've got only basically this 10 to 30 year window. All right, so I have spoken into the ether for the last half hour. Maybe it's time to do some questions here. Lots of questions. Yes, Sarah, so I've actually been, this is Laura, I've been gathering with the help of Jenny some questions that are coming through that I think would be really relevant to what you were speaking on and probably to the biggest group. And I think we probably have time for three or four questions at this point. So I will start with one that's come through from a few people based on what you were just saying about the stability of the binder. Is there anything that people can do within their collections to help with the stabilization of that? Absolutely. So the research shows that if you can place those items into cooler and drier temperatures, that will make a huge difference in promoting life expectancy. So the more hot and more humid that it is, the worse off those items will be. Now there are some questions about whether or not you can reverse it and we'll probably, I'll get into that, well, might as well just answer it right now and if I come across it again. There have been discussions about whether or not you can reverse this deterioration at least temporarily prior to reformatting. And there are sort of untested methods, or I should say they're not peer-reviewed methods of baking tapes, which can be done at higher temperatures and low humidity. I tend to think that this is a very dangerous process, especially if you're dealing also with vinegar syndrome. I think that it would be better simply to desiccate the tape, that is to lower the humidity of that tape a great deal prior to reformatting. And some people have said anecdotally that that's beneficial. Another thing that you can do is you can make sure your tapes are clean prior to reformatting, that that seems to consolidate the surface of the tape. The cleaning system that I'm thinking of is one where you're basically wiping the surface of the tape against a nonwoven polyester fabric. And most good quality reformatting companies own these tape cleaning machines. They probably look a lot like they were originally configured for data tape cleaning. So those two things, lowering the temperature and humidity for the long term, definitely lowering the temperature and definitely lowering the humidity and desiccating the tape prior to reformatting and then cleaning the tape. Those are three ways of dealing with these issues. If you have a very badly deteriorated tape, you have to take it to a professional because you just simply won't have the type of equipment or the kind of expertise on staff, my guess is. And I think that that's something to keep in mind as you identify tapes that are quite damaged. Great. Well, another question came through from Marcia in Northern California and this relates to what you were talking about with the analog materials and digital materials that she asked. So analog needs to be reformatted but not digital when migrating. Can you maybe clarify that a little bit? Yes. Thank you. And I realized as I was sort of going down that path that it could be confusing. When you're moving from analog to digital, it does need to be encoded as a digital signal. So yes, the analog tape is going to have to be fed into a system where it is going to be converted into ones and zeros. That digital audio tape, a digital audio tape in particular, is a particular type of format. You need to feed it into the computer but you don't want to do any changing to its native formatting. You simply want to rename it as a WAV file. And that system, and you have to do it in an audio software system but it can be done. And that's really, you just don't want to try to bump up the resolution or bump it down for that matter. It's natively 1644. Does that help? I'm sure it does. We haven't had any other questions pop up on the side there. So here's another question related to the magnetic media because I'm sure a lot of us end up with things that are in collections that don't necessarily have identifying markers on them. So Sarah from Southampton in the UK says, if there's no clues on the box of reels, how do you tell if it's audio or video one inch or two inch? I sympathize if you don't have any clues on the box and then you have to look at context. You hope that it's in relationship with a number of other elements. Is it in a box with a bunch of motion picture film? Then maybe it's the audio soundtrack to that motion picture film. Is it part of a large collection of videotapes? Then it's probably the master of videotape. Look for things like somebody scrolling IPS on it. IPS is a dead giveaway that it's inches per second. Look for things that clue you into audio terminology versus video. Color is going to be a dead giveaway that it's a video unless it's a recording of some audio, some instrumental thing that's called color. You know what I mean? This is where you have to look at the contextual clues. There is a way that you can actually develop out the tracks on an audio tape or videotape. There is something called Farrah Fluid. Farrah Fluid is sort of, you can buy it from educational chemistry stores where you can do experiments. This is a fluid that you paint onto a portion of the tape and it will actually make the tracks come out. You will be able to see them and it won't damage the tape especially because you're not going to do it down the whole section of the tape. If you look at the tracks and they're up and down, it's much more likely that it's an audio tape than if they're sort of at an angle. If they're at an angle that means it's a helical recording and if it's a helical recording it's much more likely to be a video. Now all of these different types of tracks are actually published as pictures in different articles or different standards books that are produced by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers is called SMPTI and SMPTI has been the standards-making organization for what these tracks are supposed to look like and so that's one of the more discerning ways that you can tell the difference between your one-inch and your two-inch audio and video if you have to go to that extent. Okay. Well, here's another one that again we're getting a lot of questions about but this one is from Marcia and Honolulu and people are wondering if you have any tips or ideas for the best way to go about cleaning LBs. Yes. So there is some fantastic resources at the Library of Congress on developing disc cleaning solution and how properly to do it and I believe it's in one of my resources slides. I'm going to try to. Let me look forward in my paper copy here. If for some crazy reason I didn't put it in there what I'm going to suggest is that I put it out on the website afterwards but I think, I don't see it in my list however I will put it up in the follow-up of this presentation I will definitely put it up on the website the Library of Congress recipe for disc cleaning and also I want to really promote a book that was written in 1959 and was published under the auspices of the Library of Congress in the United States by Pickett and Lemko and that is on my list of resources. It has also a pretty comprehensive discussion of how to clean your discs and safe ways to do things. Everybody has a technique. It's all in the wrist I suppose but it has less is more and being very observant as you're doing it is the key thing. So that would be the better thing than me trying to describe it. Great. So I think the more resources after the better. It's a huge topic that we can't possibly cover in an hour and a half prehensively. Well another question though that I think we're always all worried about our collections going up in flames. Connie from Fort Smith and Ava from San Luis Obispo are both curious about how flammable some of these materials you're talking about are whether it's the cylinders or the discs Well I don't want to be too abundantly cautious on this. To my knowledge no audio collections have gone up in flames because they may have a small component of cellulose nitrate in them. This is unlike film collections where cellulose nitrate based films are problematic and need to be stored according to the National Fire Protection Association standards. These materials do not fall within the National Fire Protection specialized media code so you can breathe a sigh of relief. You should of course have these materials properly stored. They should be in the proper environment. They should be handled appropriately. They should be segregated from one another in sleeves or in some sort of handling container. All of those things and of course we hope that you have a place where they're stored where there is some sort of sprinkler system but a sprinkler system is what you need. You don't need a special you know how on or anything like that. So the flammability is I mean all these materials were burned and they're plastics and resins so they have a variety of flash points and so forth but they're not at the level of conspicuous concerns you would have with a film collection. So following your best practice for archival library museum sprinklering and maintenance is really where you should go with these materials. Do they have any effect more from off-gassing or anything like that to the materials that might be stored near them? Right well if you have audiotape which is made of cellulose acetate as its base you will have vinegar syndrome which is essentially where the acetic acid or the cellulose acetate base is deteriorating and off-gassing this mild but obnoxious acetic acid vapor and that can be problematic for a number of reasons. It can be very unpleasant to you and your coworkers so you want to segregate those materials. Those are materials which are candidates for reformatting as soon as possible and you know having some kind of micro chamber sleeve or something that will sequester some of the fumes putting them into cooler storage as you'll hear in our next section we can't freeze magnetic media, there's a variety of reasons for that but the cooler that you can get them the better off and that's an acid in the air of course is a catalyst for other types of problems ranging from with your photographs having auto-catalyzed deterioration there. Paper also responds to acids in the air so yes there is going to be a problem with there being off-gassing. You need to deliberately do what you can to address that as an issue. Well I think that's a perfect segue into your next section though so we'll save any other questions to our next little break in there. Excellent, thanks so much. Okay we're going to go through preservation and handling of these materials. Housing, environment and some treatment issues and many of these things I mentioned before. So I think that the most important thing about housing is to consider pragmatic solutions to your needs so your cylinders need to be upright. If you can keep your original containers that's great but those original containers should be within handling containers so there's something else around that box and you want to handle these materials only at the edges preferably with a glove or with very clean hands. We've had the debate about whether or not wearing gloves is a good idea. For some of us our tactile sense is much better if we don't have a glove on and that might be really important the difference between not dropping an object and dropping it. So that's an important consideration. Your discs should be upright. They should be on edge unless they are broken in which case you're going to have to put them flat into some kind of sink mat housing. And it's useful to put them in replacement sleeves. You probably want to keep the... Usually there's important information on older sleeves so you want to photocopy that. You want to have that information around. Sometimes the cardboard sleeve has intrinsic value as well and you want to keep that but it doesn't necessarily have to be cheek by jowl with the original disc. You can put them into good quality polyethylene sleeves and there's all sorts of clever solutions that people have come up with to house these materials. Magnetic media should be upright. Even though they're on a reel they should be in a box upright. If you possibly can, if you're not going to be able to reformat these materials taking them off of their original flotted hubs and putting them onto unflotted hubs is very useful because what happens is that they start to warp outside of the slots. Plastic containers are fine rather than cardboard or paperboard because paperboard and cardboard begins to deteriorate itself and creates a lot of dust. And you want to remove the record tab if it's an audio cassette or cartridge. If you can find the record tab you want to remove that so it cannot be accidentally recorded. There's some other issues about making sure that those materials are not placed near magnetic fields which makes a lot of sense. Magnetic fields, it's unlikely that say a passing motor of say a vacuum cleaner would cause a material to be erased but it's better to be safe than sorry so I put them sort of above the floor and far away from motors and that kind of thing. In general your storage boxes should be made of good quality materials. You don't want to have storage containers that will retain a large static charge. Now there was a question that was sort of pre-populated about static as an issue and let me just say that while these materials should be stored in a cool and dry environment when they are reformatted and they are being exposed to a lot of friction that reformatting space should have higher humidity. It should be at 50% relative humidity or 55% relative humidity and so an item that is being reformatted at the place where it's being reformatted the humidity should be higher. That will prevent some of the static discharge from occurring. This is a chart that I think is really helpful as you're sort of trying to figure out where these materials should live within your building or what shelf. Look at the weight and space requirements for things like these discs. Each item for an LP it weighs about half a pound but you can get 66 of them and on a 3 foot shelf it can be 101 pounds. That's a lot of weight. So you want to consider where you're putting these materials. If you go down to the 2 inch quad which would be the same thing as a 2 inch reel-to-reel audio tape they can be somewhere around 25 pounds, pretty heavy. You can only get around 4 items per foot and on a 3 foot shelf it's going to be over 200 pounds. So you want to consider where you're going to put these materials and what your requirements are. So the ANSI or that's the National Standards Committee, American National Standards Committee but it's actually also an ISO, International Standards Committee, recommendation from IT9.1396 suggests cool and dry and it gives you tiers of performance. They have an expectation that commercial non-permanent materials can be at one level whereas permanently valuable materials should be at another. But notice it says they never recommend below 46 degrees Fahrenheit and the reason is because there are some brands of manufacture of audio materials of magnetic media materials in particular that have different freeze and liquidization temperatures for the lubricants that are in the binder. If these items were to be frozen or were below 46 degrees Fahrenheit they might separate out from the binder and you wouldn't want that to happen and that's why these materials are not supposed to be frozen. Unfortunately, I don't know which brands those are and so we just have to go on anecdotal evidence that they shouldn't be frozen. And of course you want to minimize light exposure, magnetic fields, heat sources, especially for things like cylinders and those early discs and vibration, especially if you have things like glass or a fragile adhered cellulose nitrate lack or film on your discs. So here's some of the cleaning. Oh see, here it is. Here's the Library of Congress cleaning solution and its techniques. I thought I had it on here. So for cylinders all you're going to need to do is have a soft brush and a vacuum. You're not going to apply the vacuum directly to the surface. You're going to have a barrier between your cylinder and your vacuum and you would have it on some sort of Rio stat, so it would be at the lowest section. And you would set it up very much like an object. So for object conservation, see if you'd be doing this kind of dusting. I would say you would only do this prior to reformatting. This is not a routine activity. The problem with dust, of course, on a cylinder or anything that's soft is that it could become embedded if that item got too warm, but you're not going to put your items into warm spaces and you're not going to expose them to dust. So my feeling is touch it as little as you can. For discs, there's a very comprehensive cleaning solution and discussion of how to do the cleaning at this Library of Congress website with some information about that. And then for tapes, both cassette and for reel-to-reel, there is an automatic cloth cleaning system that clears deposits from the surface of tape. It uses a nonwoven polyester to clean the surface of the tape. It's a machine. I've seen it for sale at some computer data companies, but essentially what it does is it runs the tape past these stationary cloth stations and it sort of wipes the surface free. Another thing that you can do with magnetic media if you have just surface dirt sort of on the edges of it is you can vacuum it much as you would with a cylinder. Now, I don't subscribe to the idea that you would bake tapes, but there's a difference of opinion amongst a lot of professionals about it. I believe the desiccation of the tape that is bringing the humidity, the local humidity down to 10% relative to its environment is probably a better thing to do. And you can do that by setting up small desiccation chambers using salts and you can get further advice on that sort of thing. That's a singular treatment kind of decision that you would need to make as you review formatting an item. In the meantime, cooler and drier. That's the best thing to do for your magnetic media. So those are really fast. I actually got through that pretty fast, so I can go ahead and we can take more questions about environment and housing. Well, we've got more questions for you, Sarah. Okay. Well, one question, there's a few questions that came up about storing just different storage methods that you went through. Four cassettes, both Mary in London, Ontario and Tish in Dubuque, Iowa, had questions about storage. One, can you leave the cassette tapes in their original container? Would you recommend that or not just overall? No matter what container they're in, should they just be put on the shelf or should they be boxed? What's the best thing to do? Absolutely. Yes, please leave them with the original container unless that container is going to damage the tape, but that original container usually has important information. Now, sometimes the original container is falling apart, in which case you should photocopy the contents and get a new container. But I would rather spend your money, I would rather that you spend your money reformatting that item than buying a lot of new supplies. But for the sake of keeping these items away from light and dust, I would place the original container into handling containers so that you have them boxed, groups of them boxed together. And that's especially true for cassette tapes. It is not at all practical for two-inch audio tapes. It's not at all practical to try to box up large materials, but these small cassettes, these small recordings, handling containers are very useful for moving them around within your Archives Library and Museum collection. But I would definitely say that replacing original, the original boxes is a matter of priority and cost and personnel. So if you can get them into just a larger oversized container, that's better than spending a lot of time replacing original containers. Great. All about practicality here. In a related question in terms of practicality, Margaret from San Pedro, California has said, for shelving materials she knows that metal, of course, is best. But what if you're at a smaller institution perhaps and you're just stuck with wood shelves that are sealed with polyurethane? Should you panic and do a lot of fundraising to replace them? Or is it okay? Well, in California, of course, I'm always also concerned a little bit about earthquakes, so I probably would put my money into earthquake-proofing things as well. I think that the wood is probably sort of fine. It is, again, a matter of priorities. What I would do is I would cut some amount of some sort of vapor barrier. It could be mylar, it could be marvel seal, it could be something that you could put on top of the shelf that would provide an additional barrier between the polyurethane and the wood. Wood in particular, some types of woods have such high resins, even when sealed, that they cause problems. But if you can do that additional bit of housekeeping, that would be great. And then if you have some sort of barrier, say, of mylar, just a shelf liner that's mylar or something like that, then they'll actually slide off of the shelf a little bit easier as well. So that's something to think about. So related to storing things in cooler, drier environments, say you do have things stored in cool storage or cold storage, is there any preconditioning time or anything like that prior to transfer digitization, perhaps from Jocelyn and Baltimore? Oh, great. If your materials are stored in a cool environment where going from your cool environment into your work room, you're going to be passing dew point, then you absolutely have to acclimate your materials. And for those people who are very familiar with film and cold storage, you know what I'm talking about, but for everybody else, what this means is simply, if you're going from a 40-degree room, or let's say it's 46 degrees because that's what the ISO standard says, going from a 46-degree room to a work room which is 72 degrees, I think that you might be passing dew point somewhere at the 60-degree level. So what you want to do is you want to put those materials into a vapor-proof sealed package. It could be a cooler that you would use for a nice cooler or whatever. Put those materials in, bring them out into the warm-up room, and you want to let it wait for at least six hours. Of course, it depends. There are mathematical formulas for this. Why not just let it wait for 24 hours before you open up the container, the vapor-proof packaging, and then it should have warmed up to room temperature, and you won't have this problem of condensation. Once it's in that space, it's still going to have some acclimation time. My guess is that it would probably be better just to not immediately pop it into the playback machines. We've done a whole variety of things with our materials. Usually, there's a little bit of a line before that item gets into the playback machine, so it's not going to hurt it if it's going to be in that environment for a couple of days, two weeks, or whatever. The point is that you just want to acclimate it if you're going from an area that's cool enough that you'll be crossing dew point. Great. Well, we do have more questions, but I know we only have about 15 minutes left, so I'll let you go and do your last section. Okay. Thanks. All right. Here's some important resources. First of all, I had the real pleasure of working with Laura, who's been asking me these questions, on a great program, a video that comes out of the Conservation Center, ccah8.org, education videos, they have a race against time, a whole section about audio, video, and film that you can check out. And then there's these five books, which I think are great, very helpful. Notice I did put a book in there about the care and handling of CDs and DVDs, and you can take a look at that if I didn't because I didn't cover that in today's discussion. So enjoy those Fred Byers, McWilliams, Ticket and Lemko, which is the classic, John Van Bogart, which you're going to go out and find right away after this seminar, and the Emanuel of Sound Archive Administration from 1990, which is very useful. But read all of this with a grain of salt. Techniques are changing all the time, and that's why you really want to be involved if you have a large collection with any of these organizations. The Association for Courted Sound Collections, International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives, the Electronic Media Group of the American Institute for Conservation, the Society of American Archivists Recorded Sound Drown Table, and the Audio Engineering Society. These are all great places to learn more about your audio materials. And I would not, I think that it's appropriate to talk to enthusiasts and hobbyists because they know, they care deeply about these materials. And while sometimes it's folklore, sometimes it's really, truly useful information, and they can help with context. Maybe that's where, you know, you don't know if it's a one inch or two inch audio or video. Maybe that enthusiast or hobbyist can tell you. And reformatting vendors, especially sort of more national vendors, can be extremely, extremely helpful in helping you strategize about your collections. And they've seen a lot of different formats and a lot of different materials. So I highly recommend them. Okay, so here's some things that I wanted to expose you to today. Some preservation priority surveys because in this very brief discussion you have not had the chance to really delve into your own collections. And that's where the real rubber hits the road kind of thing. So here are a number of surveys. Let me say first, all of the surveys I'm going to tell you about, they're online, they are free. So you can do a lot of great things with these surveys, or they'll tell you about other surveys or other resources. The sound savings URL here, the publication I'm talking about was produced by Stanford University Library conservators. And what it did is it looked at, these are the things that you ought to have in any survey that you create for yourself. Okay, Caliper from California, there are two parts of it. One is for paper-based collections, one is for audio-visual collections. It's an online database tool. You need to understand how to create random samples. Once you've sort of crossed that hurdle, you can do this survey and it creates very nice management reports that you can go and you can show the people who have the money and the decision-making power. The AVDB created in 2008 by Columbia University, this probably requires a little bit of sophistication in terms of your own knowledge level. It also requires you to be in touch with a curator because it asks for value from a curator's standpoint. And that's a really interesting concept. As far as I'm concerned, a good survey should include three components. The value, the intellectual or intrinsic or whatever value that you can associate with your collection. The value is important. Use statistics. How much are these items going to be used? Maybe they're not used because they're an obsolete format. But the point is you want to understand your use statistics and finally you want to know what the risk of your collection is. So you need to have those three components. When you look at your collection, you want to look at value, use and risk. So this particular survey is a good one for thinking about value. The FACET tool out of Indiana University which has a tremendous, tremendous audio archive. You can see that it is only for audio recordings. It does require some playback. If you don't have playback machines, you might not be able to do this. But it's also a really well documented and great tool. Then there's Vipers and this is from New York University Library. It has, for both audio and video, all of these systems have really good documentation. So if you download this tool, you'll be able to run it yourself. And then there's the Audio Visual Self Assessment Program which was created, I believe, by an IMLS grant in the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. And this is a really interesting tool, especially because it gives you these in-depth pop-up tutorials. So if you have a mystery format, you can look at pictures and pictures and pictures of videos and audio materials and it will help you find out what your items are. And you can do item level or random samples. So it's a pretty interesting tool as well. So here are some data points you would want to consider if you were looking at your own audio materials. You want to look at some housekeeping issues. What are your dust and dirt on the container on the item? Are there any obvious deterioration issues? Is there delamination, some kind of moldy, soapy film? Is there breakage? How good is the information on the label? If you don't have information on the label, that automatically says to me that it's not as valuable. I'd realize that that seems, perhaps, in some ways kind of mean to that collection, but I got a lot of other collections and they've all got the good labels, so I'd rather work on those. Think about your entire environment. What's the quality of the housing? What's the quality of the air? Have you reduced the pollution that comes into the space? Is the temperature low? Is the humidity the proper space? And then if you've played back these materials, what kind of things are you hearing? Are you hearing distortion? Are you hearing pops? Are you hearing problems that you don't think are appropriate? And this is where becoming a kind of search of how things are supposed to sound. You can't have the expectation that a recording made, an instantaneous recording made in 1927. It's going to have the same fidelity as a recording that was remastered. It's a 2-inch, 32-track tape that was created in the 1990s. It just isn't going to have the same sound fidelity, and it shouldn't. And those are the kinds of things that you need to know about your collection. Especially for magnetic media, there are some features that you can look at on your tapes that will help you understand what the problems are. Is the cassette or the reel-to-reel, is it properly wound? Is it at either end of the take-up reel, or in the case of just reel-to-reel, is it properly wound? And is there any popping or spoking or strands of audio tapes or coming out of the tape pack? Is there a record tab on the cassette? And if there is, and you would immediately take it off, that could be an indication of keeping, that it wasn't well cared for, and therefore it may have some deterioration issues. And then you might want to consider whether or not the tape brand is considered a poor quality tape brand. An Ampex tape is going to be a good quality tape, typically. A 3M tape is typically going to be a good quality tape, but a little leprechaun tape probably isn't. And that's just, you know, is it a cheap brand of tape or not? So I've already mentioned these three principles, value, use, and risk, and I'm going to go into them just quickly. When you think about value, and these are ideas that are brought up, the Mellon Foundation has put a lot of resources into helping archives come up with survey tools. And value is one of the things that they have been very interested in. So these four points come from the Mellon survey. How unique is the material? And how complete is it? Is it one tape, but you know that there were 80 tapes? Is it three cylinders, and those are the only three cylinders known in the world? How deep is the collection? Is it very deep? It goes for years and years and years, or it's just a snapshot? And what kind of research trends are important and what are people interested in? And you need to know your own collections from that standpoint. And those are the features of yet value. You have to decide what constitutes low, moderate, and high use. I'm not going to tell you what that is. We have our own metrics for that, but you can say, look, if an audio tape is used once every five years in our collection that's low use, that might be high use for somebody else. And I won't tell you what that is, but you draw those lines. And then you need to figure that in, like I say, you have to track the use. And finally, you want to look at the condition, the format obsolescence, and whether or not it is considered a unique recording or the first recording, or if it's an element of a final product. And those things all have to do with risk. The more rare it is in terms of its format, the more problematic the condition, then the higher the risk. And that is it for resources and surveys or for anything else. So I'm happy to take more questions. Great. So this is Jenny. I'm just going to quickly pull over the homework assignment for today's webinar. And this link is also on the course website. And then I'm also going to ask everyone who's logged in as a group. So one person logged in, but multiple people are watching. Well, your group leader, go ahead and mark down everyone who's watching with you. And if you logged in today with your first and last name, we've got you. Don't worry about filling this out. It looks like we have a couple minutes. Laura, I'm going to go ahead and ask you. I know that you had a question on hold. I think we have time for it. Okay. So we'll lob one more at you, Sarah, here. So topic, near and dear to my heart and should be important to everybody out there, I think, is someone asked the question, what do you feel the most important considerations are for these different media in terms of a disaster recovery situation? Right. So I had such a good question. Which one is most vulnerable? And it really depends on what the disaster is, as well as how you've prioritized these materials. Acetates are incredibly vulnerable. So if I didn't get that across to you, those probably are going to be the most damaged in an emergency. I think you need to have made a decision within your collections about what are the highest priorities for salvage. And of course, if you look at the Heritage Preservation Disaster Salvage Wheel, they talk about ways of prioritizing within magnetic media and other types of film and video and photos. So I think if what you've got is a problem with, you know, if things have been submerged, then you do have to dry these materials out very quickly. If things have been sort of, if there's smoke damage, you probably can wait whereas with paper you might not be able to wait because it could sink further in. I think that our biggest issues with this type of material is just the slow disaster, the obsolescence, the difficulty of reformatting these materials and finding the resources. So it's an interesting, is it a one-time disaster or is our biggest problem with audio-visual materials that there is a huge volume of it and only a very, very, very small portion of it is being saved. Okay, thank you so much. It looks like we are just out of time. I'm just going to remind everyone our third webinar for this course is on Wednesday at 2 o'clock, same place, same time. Sarah and Laura, thank you both so much and thank you to our audience for logging in today. Thanks a lot, Jenny. Thanks a lot, Laura. Thank you.