From fragile early wax recordings to today’s podcasts, the nation’s audio heritage is at peril, a report from the Library of Congress has concluded.
The report, an outgrowth of a 2000 law mandating the Library of Congress to put together a national media preservation plan, found that efforts to preserve sound recordings are a haphazard patchwork threatened by poor funding and technical skills, copyright restrictions and, in the case of modern recordings, the very ephemeral nature of the Internet.
“It is relatively easy to recognize the importance of recorded sound from decades ago. What is not so evident is that older recordings actually have better prospects to survive another 150 years than recordings made last week using digital technologies,” the report’s authors write.
Threat of Obsolescence
One of the key problems with preserving media, whether it be audio files, films or still images, is the constantly shifting nature of technology, said Howard Besser, a New York University professor who heads the Moving Image Archive and Preservation Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
From old wax cylinder recordings to WWII-era wire recordings, the technology to listen to older recordings is constantly becoming harder to come by.
“We still have the wire records, we still have the media, we still have the wax recordings, but we don’t have the machinery to play it back,” Besser told TechNewsWorld.
The same will be true of today’s dominant audio format, MP3.
“The likelihood is that 10 to 15 years from now, most software will not support MP3,” he said.
Copyright Issues
A key problem in making sure the vast holdings of record companies and other private content owners — particularly materials that were created in the digital age — can be preserved and maintained is copyright law, according to the report.
“Under present laws and many existing licensing agreements, it is not legal to copy much born-digital content to public access servers and provide access to it in an institutional setting,” according to the report.
While copyright law appears to be routinely ignored by both preservationists and rights holders when it comes to preserving media, report coauthor Sam Brylawski told TechNewsWorld that copyright issues are still impeding efforts to save recordings before they disappear forever.
“Most preservation projects involve outside funding, and funders are less likely to give money to projects that can’t be made publicly accessible,” he said.
Various Recommendations
The report recommends changing U.S. copyright law to make it easier for preservationists to make materials, particularly orphaned recordings for which no owner can be found, available to the public domain.
The authors also recommend investing more money to train preservationists, particularly at small and medium institutions, to save recordings.
Why It’s Important
While the idea of saving old recordings sounds nice, it’s sure to meet fierce competition for public and private dollars in today’s stressed economy.
However, Besser said it’s enormously important to save the history contained in these recordings.
“For the average person, certainly for children, to teach them about another time period, to have them hear the voices from that period is profound,” he said.
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Never mind old software. Mind, I think the idea that we will not be able to use MP3s in 10-15 years is.. not likely. We still use Jpeg, despite the fact that it was made more than that length of time in the past, as a means to store digital copies of full sized photos (where one didn’t worry about quality, since the final "print" was scaled down so much the artifacts disappeared anyway). Even if Google has its way and implements its new format, and people adopt it (horrible idea, imho), we will still see converters for the old formats forever, just as there are converters for nearly every image format ever developed, often in the very applications used to create new content, like Photoshop.
If anything, the computer industry recognizes that its fairly trivial to include, in most cases, an importer/converter. Its the rest of the world that has a problem, where the technology is *not* digital, the method of recover mechanical in nature, and the ownership, even if known, often tied up in so much, "I want money for that", thinking that **as I type this** probably 3-4 old films have decayed to the point of unrecoverability. (Well, maybe not that fast, but possibly within the next few days.)
We don’t have the people, the money to pay greedy companies, or, as the article points out, any way to archive and/or salvage such works, **especially** if they actually *do* still belong to some studio, which may have not even opened the door to the warehouse they are in for 10-15 years.