Republished from: Fondren Library. “News From Fondren: Volume 28, No. 1, Fall 2018.” (2018) Rice University: http://hdl.handle.net/1911/105013. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
As part of an ongoing effort to preserve historic Rice audio recordings, Fondren Library is working with renowned audio and video preservation vendor George Blood LP to digitize hundreds of vintage Shepherd School of Music performances.
Approximately 400 newly identified open audio reels, dating between the late 1970s and the late 1980s, will be shipped to George Blood’s Philadelphia facility, where their engineers will transfer them as high-quality digital copies. Once returned, these digital copies will be added to the Rice Digital Scholarship Archive’s ever-growing, publicly accessible collection of Shepherd School performances.
Founded by its namesake as Safe Sound Archive in 1992, George Blood LP reformats thousands of audiovisual materials a month, and has worked with clients such as the Library of Congress American Folklife Center, the New York Public Library and Columbia University. Most recently, Blood partnered with the Internet Archive and the Archive of Contemporary Music to digitize and make publicly available a collection of approximately 200,000 early 20th-century shellac records, known as The Great 78 Project (http://great78.archive.org/).
Funding for this massive digitization effort was provided by the Rice Historical Society, along with the Friends of Fondren Library, which held a “paddles-up” auction event at their 2018 Gala honoring Molly and Jim Crownover ’65 and recognizing the Woodson Research Center’s 50th anniversary. Together, the organizations donated $37,000 to cover the costs associated with the digitization of Shepherd School audio content.
While there is some agreement in the audio community that the age of an open reel tape is not directly related to its stability as an audio medium, reel audio is highly susceptible to damage from fluctuating temperatures and humidity, as well as mold and fungi. Moreover, a change in manufacturing techniques during the late 1970s resulted in some brands of tape that would eventually stick to the machine or fall apart when played, known as sticky shed syndrome. Vendors like Blood are equipped to assess tapes for such audio emergencies and remedy them long enough for a digital copy to be produced.
This digitization project is actually one of several projects to reformat and preserve audio of Shepherd performances. In 2005, hundreds of audio reels–comprising approximately 340 Shepherd concerts and recitals, originally delivered to Fondren for in-library student use — were digitized by audio vendor BMS/Chase (now known as VeVa Sound). These digitized recordings were later added to the Rice Digital Scholarship Archive at https://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/71868.
Eventually, the Shepherd School discontinued sending reel copies of performances, instead delivering cassette tapes, and, later, burned compact discs. Both of these formats were convenient for access, but have proven to be unreliable in the long-term; the Museum of Obsolete Media rates recordable CDs and tapes as moderate and high risk media formats, respectively, noting that many of them may be reaching the end of their expected life spans.
To preserve this content, Fondren’s digital scholarship services, access services and technical services departments and Woodson Research Center collaborated in 2016 to a plan to digitize Shepherd cassette tapes and, later, CDs. As of October 2018, more than 400 Shepherd performances extracted from tapes and CDs have been made available through the Rice Digital Scholarship Archive at https://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/77130.
Scott Carlson
Metadata Coordinator
