The Tangible Media Program at the Library of Congress
The Tangible Media Program at the Librar y of Congress
Moryma Aydelott
Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Recommended Citation
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Article 9
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Audio-v isual Preservation ...
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care staff to detect (before damage) whether
media can safely be played for transfer and
access to content.
The library undertakes additional research
into a range of AV formats to ensure long-term
preservation and access to content. Research
projects include cleaning solutions for lacquer
discs and characterizing the nature of the
exudate that forms on the surface to ensure
cleaning formulations do not remove disc
substrate, determining the composition of
wax cylinders and which formats are more
prone to degradation, composition and
quality assurance testing on film cans, assessing
sound fidelity of magnetic tapes before and
after baking, and forensic assessment of CD/
DVD and hard drive content recovery. Project
summaries are updated as new research is
completed and can be found at http://www.
loc.gov/preservation/scientists/projects/
index.html. One of the challenges with AV
collections is institutions truly understanding
the current state and condition of these
collections, including accurate numbers of various
formats. Knowledge of the condition is an
aspect that is complicated by unknown
histories of storage environments, use and wear
of items in these collections. The Heritage
Health Index is a National Collections Care
Survey first undertaken in 2004 to assess the
condition of American
heritage institutions
and repeated in 2014
. While this was more
focused on museums, there was a section
on AV formats, and these modern materials
still remain high-risk items as man-made
compositions degrade over time. The 2012
Library of Congress National Recording
Preservation Plan discusses the need for a
national research agenda, continued research
into preservation aspects for AV and training
and technology requirements. As part of this
plan, the library continues to address and
research issues with AV formats as they come
to light and endeavor to make this information
and research available to other institutions
to assist in preservation of their collection.
In addition, the Preservation Reformatting
Division (PRD) is responsible for the review
of endangered materials that need to be
copied to more stable formats using both analog
and digital approaches to meet this objective.
PRD provides access to at-risk library
materials through converting items to new formats
including microfilm, facsimiles or digital
reproductions.
Conclusions
Audio-visual materials represent a very
special component of our cultural heritage,
these “new” storage formats being
cutting-edge at the time and allowing us greater
advances in accessing and storing large
volumes of information. In addition to heritage
institutions, many archives and businesses use
or retrieve information from some formats,
so understanding how best to preserve the
content assures prevention of loss of content
in many areas of social, historic and business
Against the Grain / September 2015
organizations with online Resources
Association of Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC)
http://www.arsc-audio.org/pdf/ARSCTC_resources.pdf
International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives
http://www.iasa-web.org/
Audio Engineering Society (AES)
http://www.aes.org/
Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers (SMPTE)
https://www.smpte.org/
functions. While there has been a move
towards digital storage, the storage media this
digital information is on still remains the risk
component, and manufacturers will continue
to develop new formats as technology
advances. Continuing to preserve our modern and
historic AV formats and storage will engage
researchers for many years to come.
Creatively utilizing these new technologies to capture
sound and video from historic formats that
are machine-dependent will assure retrieval
of hidden collections and preservation of our
cultural heritage.
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/big_data_the_next_frontier_for_innovation
The Tangible Media Program at
the Library of Congress
TTangible Media is the broad term we use for non-networked digital collection
he Library of Congress has a wide variety of digital items in its collections.
items that a user can hold. It includes floppy discs and thumb drives, CDs,
DVDs, hard drives, and digital tape. There are over 300TB of known digital data
across the Library of Congress’ Library Services divisions on various types of
tangible media. In 2011, Library Services began the Tangible Media Program to look
at obsolete tangible media formats in Library of Congress collections and begin to
explore what could be done to develop workflows that could be used on a variety of
materials in the multiple curatorial divisions and provide a backup copy of the digital
data stored on long-term storage.
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