In preparation for tomorrow’s class I’ve been reading up about the Kitchen Sisters and the archive being created by the Pop Up Archive team. Together with the Hughes reading for this week, my head is just swimming with all of the possible forms of media that are being lost because they can no longer be played – either because the recordings are degraded or the machines to play the media are no longer available.
In my first career as a corporate video producer (for Telcordia) we ran in to this problem all of the time. People would come to my department with Betamax tapes and ask how can they watch this? (We kept an old Betamax machine and converted the tapes to VHS in those days!) It is mind boggling to think about all of the forms of media that have come and gone — and, about the media we use RIGHT NOW that will be obsolete in just a few years.
With this in mind, I’d like to share a link with the class from Syracuse University’s Belfer Audio Archives. I was very fortunate to visit the collection about six years ago, when my family looked at Syracuse as a possible college for my older son (he ended up going to another school). The collection includes some of the earliest recordings on cylinders, dating back to the nineteenth century. You can search on their collection and listen to recordings (fair warning — this can be addictive!):
http://library.syr.edu/belfer/index.php
