If you listen to music, the state of recorded sound may strike you as healthy and robust. Whether you hear it in a club, on the radio, on mp3, compact disc or LP, and whether the recording was made last week or decades ago, the sound is solid and the experience can be immersive.
But historians of recorded sound have long been fretting about the relative delicacy of that sound, or more specifically, of the media on which it is stored. And anyone who has listened to transfers made from early cylinders - the dominant format for the first quarter-century of recordings, before the invention of the flat 78 rpm disc - or who has tried to play a digital file in an obsolete format, understands their concerns.
These worries, and their ramifications for the national legacy, became a matter of government concern when Congress passed the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000. That bill directed the Library of Congress to âœplan and coordinate a national effort to develop policies and programs to save our nation’s recorded sound history and ensure its accessibility to future generations.â€
Now the library and its National Recording Preservation Board, which includes musicians, composers, musicologists, archivists and representatives from the record industry, have announced a plan meant to streamline the ways recordings are archived and made available. All told, the 78-page Library of Congress National Recording Preservation Plan, which was completed in December and released on Wednesday, includes 32 recommendations.
The plan addresses ways to preserve and digitize recordings, with special attention to rarities like broadcasts and recor! dings made on antique, neglected and other “at risk†formats. The urgency of this part of the project is clear from the library’s estimate that about half the recordings originally made on cylinders, for example, are already lost.
“As a nation,†James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress said when he announced the plan, “we have good reason to be proud of our record of creativity in the sound-recording arts and sciences. However, our collective energy in creating and consuming sound recordings has not been matched by an equal level of interest in preserving them for posterity. Radio broadcasts, music, interviews, historic speeches, field recordings, comedy records, author readings and other recordings have already been forever lost to the American people.â€
Among the missing are early recordings made by Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland, discs by George Gershwin and a wire recording made in the cockpit of the Enola Gay during the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945.
The library’s lan also includes guidelines for the creation of a national directory of sound collections and their holdings; educational programs, including the establishment of degree programs in sound preservation and archiving, and a new approach to copyright that will help clarify the ownership of older recordings - a move, the library says, that will help make many long-out-of-print recordings more widely available.
