Good morning IRENE, new hope for early audio formats

The new IRENE Audio Preservation service at the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) is the culmination of a decade of research and development at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the US Library of Congress.

The IRENE technology uses a non-contact approach, which eliminates the possibility of damage caused by mechanical contact of a stylus on fragile media.  The process creates ultra-high resolution images of the audio groove structures in either 2D or 3D, and the resulting image files are then processed through software that translates them into an audio file.

NEDCC CURRENTLY WORKS WITH THE FOLLOWING FORMATS:
Wax cylinders, lacquer discs ("acetate" discs), aluminum transcription discs, shellac discs, tin foils, and other rare formats (e.g., Dictabelt, Voice-O-Graph, etc.), and can handle rare, fragile, or damaged media.

LEARN MORE:
About the NEDCC IRENE Service:
https://www.nedcc.org/audio-preservation/about

About the History of the of the IRENE IMLS Grant Project at NEDCC:
https://www.nedcc.org/audio-preservation/history

QUESTIONS about NEDCC's IRENE Audio Preservation Service?
Contact:  Mason Vander Lugt, mlugt@nedcc.orgmlugt@nedcc.org
>
  NORTHEAST DOCUMENT CONSERVATION CENTER
Andover, MA  USA -  nedcc.org
JOIN THE NEDCC E-List for Updates on new IRENE projects and other preservation news you can use:
https://www.nedcc.org/contact/sign-up-for-news

 

Source: ARCAN-L mailing list, 020141120

The Way We Were: Nova Scotia in Film, 1917-1957

The Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management has released a new digital collection called The Way We Were: Nova Scotia in Film, 1917-1957. An alternate URL is via its YouTube channel http://youtube.com/user/nsarchives/http://youtube.com/user/nsarchives/ According to an announcement on the ARCAN-L mailing list (02010 09 21), the collection consists of "96 'movies' that showcase the early years of amateur and professional filmmaking in Nova Scotia."

Questions and opinions from a Canadian music industry icon about Canadian archives

I hope legendary Vancouver rock and roll dj Red Robinson's letter to the Times-Colonist newspaper on February 13, 02010 might provoke more public discussion about relationships and expectations between donors and archives. He wrote in response to my letter of February 10, which I wrote in response to an article from February 6 about his donating his interviews to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. I took issue with this part of the original article:

Robinson would love to have kept it in Canada, but there was no place for it to go.

"There is no repository for my stuff, or Bruce Allen's, or Bryan Adams', or anybody," Robinson said. "It's a disgrace."

So he decided to give to the Rock Hall.

I posted two items about this on my personal blog at http://davidmattison.wordpress.com/2010/02/07/dj-red-robinson-interviews-heading-south-to-rock-roll-hall-of-fame-ohio-usa/ and http://davidmattison.wordpress.com/2010/02/13/red-rock-tapes-could-stay-here/.

Digitization Activities planning document from the U.S. Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative

The U.S. Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative's Still Image Working Group has released a new planning document: Digitization Activities: Project Planning and Management Outline. FADGI was established in 2007 and consists of two working groups: "The Federal Agencies Still Image Digitization Working Group will concentrate its efforts on image content such as books, manuscripts, maps, and photographic prints and negatives. The Federal Agencies Audio-Visual Working Group is focusing its work on sound, video, and motion picture film."