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This device allows recording onto a lacquer disk, a common system used for decades for reasonably stable audio capture.
IRENE, a system from Lawrence Berkeley Labs, optically captures record grooves and converts that into audio form. It's not perfect, but it's useful, as no contact is required. This version uses 2D captures; a 3D system that should more accurately extract audio is in the works.
This is in a room filled with an example of nearly every input and recording method over the entire history of fixing sound into a physical medium.
The Binghamton is a retired ferryboat that operated from 1905 to 1967 transporting passengers across the Hudson River between Manhattan and Hoboken. She was built for the Hoboken Ferry Company of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad and was designed to carry 986 passengers plus vehicles.[5] Binghamton has been permanently moored at Edgewater, Bergen County, New Jersey, United States, since 1971. The US Department of the Interior added her to the National Register of Historic Places on July 9, 1982. Operated as a floating restaurant from 1975 to 2007, the vessel is now closed and awaiting demolition.[6] The Binghamton is significant as possibly the last surviving steam ferry still afloat built to serve New York Harbor, the birthplace of commercial steam navigation, the birthplace of the double-ended steam ferry, and an area whose development was profoundly shaped by the introduction of vessels of this kind.
Material that doesn't need perfect archival condition is stored in racks in the main building as it works its way through repair or digitization.
Did you know that these recorders put sound as magnetic impulses on wire? I had never heard of such a thing. The wire recordings are relatively stable, and the wire media were available for field recording before magnetic tape was feasible.
Some music was only ever released in cassette form. This box contains a set of ethnic music being digitized (up to six cassettes can be captured simultaneously at real-time speeds) for a project.
Paul Marie Verlaine, Parallèlement, lithographs by Pierre Bonnard. Paris, A. Vollard, 1900 – from the collection of the Library of Congress
Mix tapes aren't desirable, but a fair amount of music is only available in cassette tape form, or cassettes have the best-available copy of a work.
Paul Marie Verlaine, Parallèlement, lithographs by Pierre Bonnard. Paris, A. Vollard, 1900 – from the collection of the Library of Congress
Paul Marie Verlaine, Parallèlement, lithographs by Pierre Bonnard. Paris, A. Vollard, 1900 – from the collection of the Library of Congress
The Packard Campus including quite a lot of material in the process of being entered into digital catalogs before it heads into conservation, the archives, or digitization.