RSSWNYC Archives: NEH Digitization Grant
Dec 14
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Hello Desk Setters! This is Emily of WNYC’s Haley and Emily. In last week’s post Haley described a little about the station’s history and today I’m going to describe our project, and talk about our historic audio formats and our workflow.
First a quick primer on formats: given the long history of the station, the Archives holds virtually every major audio format, save cylinder and wire. While a large variety of analog and digital formats have sprung up in radio in the past three decades or so, the earliest material in our collection is generally limited to discs and open reel acetate tape.
The bulk of the materials we are busy digitizing are 16” transcription discs, which usually consist of an aluminum core coated in nitrocellulose (often called lacquer) and recorded at 33 1/3 rpm. These discs, unlike those in your personal vinyl collection, were cut in real time at the studio or on site, are usually unique, and are played with needles much larger than those used on standard vinyl LP microgroove.
The recipe used to create the nitrocellulose layer varied from manufacturer to manufacturer, as did the application of it to the core, peculiarities which impact playback quality. There are several preservation concerns related to these discs. First, a not insignificant portion of the discs were made on glass during World War II as most aluminum was going into the war effort. These incredibly fragile artifacts require a delicate hand and prompt no small amount of anxiety. Furthermore, nitrocellulose is prone to degradation and may become brittle and flake over time or (as is very common in our collection) develop a greasy layer of palmitic acid which requires thorough cleaning using special solvents. Open reel tape also has some concerns: broken splices, tape cupping (which prevents the tape from laying flat against the playback head), and in the case of polyester-based back-coated tapes, stickiness which requires baking at a low temperature.
Transcription disc with uneven nitrocellulose layer. (Note the "WYNC" label!)
And now, on to our project. Haley and I were brought on board to head up a two-year National Endowment for the Humanities-funded grant to digitize and make available 660 hours of historic WNYC audio. We have been busily identifying broadcast materials aired from 1938 – 1970 and creating one of the most colorful spreadsheets ever made to keep track of the over 1,800 audio artifacts headed for digitization.
Unlike many archives, most of the station’s early recordings do not belong to the station – they are instead owned by the NYC Municipal Archives, who have been endlessly helpful in supplying original artifacts for digitization. We regularly head down to the Municipal building to retrieve boxes of discs still in their original sleeves now crumbling with age. After a thorough cleaning, needle selection and careful digitization in both Flat and EQ, the discs are re-housed and returned home. Open reel tapes are stored at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and retrieved in the same fashion. Each recording results in a 96 kHz, 24 bit Broadcast Wave file as well as a surrogate gold CD. Additionally, both the Municipal Archives and NYPL will receive a hard drive containing the BWF files and catalog information of all shared collection materials.
Each recording is listened to in real time to ensure high quality transfers (we run into many issues: discs may skip or have other unexpected noises; tapes need azimuth adjustment and popped splices must be repaired), and occasionally we run into unexpected surprises. During transfer we create robust PBCore 2.0 compliant catalog records that fully describe the content, utilize a controlled taxonomy to allow faceted browsing, note contributors and capture pertinent technical metadata. These records will be exported to MARC for our cooperating archives. We make use of contemporary newspapers in order to properly identify dates and names, and consult transcripts when available.
In our free time we maintain a blog, Annotations, about some of our favorite finds and maintain our favorite mayor’s twitter account. The result of this ambitious project will be a website which will make accessible our catalog and associated audio.
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