In a ‘time machine’ New York races to save a century of sound and film

He and his colleagues at the New York Public Library (NYPL) worked against the clock to preserve the contents of films, tapes, discs, and cylinders that housed sound and moving images for more than a century.

The records are getting damaged, and the machines that can play them are disappearing.

Learn from the past

For Mr. Dostaly, it’s not just about technology. He has watched other people’s lives unfold through archives.

Harry Belafonte, legendary American singer, actor, civil rights activist – and has been for a long time UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador – filmed his family over the decades, from teaching his son to ride a bike in Central Park to traveling abroad.

“I have actually seen his children from toddlers to adults,” said Mr. Dostaly.

The film of African-American civil rights leader Malcolm X’s travelogue, including footage from Mecca, most moved him. “I’m the one who’s going to make it available for everyone to see,” he recalled thinking.

By seeing footage like this – he hopes – younger generations “will realize the importance of events that occurred before they were on Earth.”

Cultural heritage

Next to him, Casey McNamara, media preservation coordinator, bent over a reel of film with a magnifying glass or jeweler’s loupe, examining it frame by frame for tears, seams and shrinkage.

On the white leader he wrote “BHARATA NATYAM,” the name of one of the oldest forms of Indian classical dance.

The film might come to him “in a rusty can, on an old projection reel, or in a cloth box, in a plastic bag.” Without the work he did, some of the collection “would have been largely invisible.”

This lab is part of NYPL’s Digital Collections Operations. Once digitized, most materials will be accessible to anyone with a library card.

“The cassettes and decks are no longer produced, but their history needs to be preserved,” explains lab manager Shahed Dowlatshahi.

This kind of work is exactly like the projects carried out by the UN World Audiovisual Heritage Daywhich is celebrated annually on October 27, is designed to highlight and help.

Preserving the history of the United Nations

In the audio room, Jeffrey Willens removed a 16-inch disc from a brown paper sleeve marked: A Year To Remember.

The UN Radio Division produced it for broadcast on New Year’s Day 1949, when the Organization was still headquartered at Lake Success on Long Island.

Copies will be sent to radio stations and UN offices around the world. Mr. Willens placed it on a turntable with a microscope mounted on it, and the voices of actor Fredric March and sportscaster Ted Husing filled the room.

In the future, engineers are digitizing the archives of William Greaves, a pioneering African-American documentary filmmaker.

The film is 2001 Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey tells the story of the American diplomat who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for brokering a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Arab countries.

Mr. Bunche was the first black Nobel laureate and later Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations.

‘Like surgery’

Time works against all that.

The acetate film that the New York Public Library is trying to preserve suffers from “vinegar syndrome,” a chemical decay that makes it brittle, warped, and smells like vinegar.

“Once that process starts, there’s no stopping it,” McNamara said. “You can slow it down with cold storage, but it will never reverse.”

Audio tapes may wrinkle or stick together and must be repaired by hand. “To be able to fix it and play it and have a successful transfer is like surgery,” said media preservation engineer Victoria Fajardo. “It is truly an honor to be one of the first people to hear much of this content for the first time since it was recorded.”

Even Digital Betacam tapes, once considered powerful, are starting to disappear. Francis Dougherty, the specialist who originally built the video laboratory, now had to clear his decks between tapes. “Every year this job gets harder,” he said. “Every year physical media degrades.”

The last of the repairmen

“The machines are getting rarer,” added Mr. Dougherty. “Older guys repairing machines are becoming less and less common.”

When asked how urgent this work was, he didn’t hesitate: “This should have been addressed 20 years ago.”

Universities are training young specialists, but there are fewer and fewer machines at their disposal.

“Without people to maintain, repair and service them, we wouldn’t be able to do this,” added Mr. Dowlatshahi. “And few people do it now.”

Work is in progress

Some solutions are made by hand. The turntable that spun PBB discs was built by Nick Bergh, a California engineer who made playback machines as “kind of a hobby.” This library is one of the first in the world.

It’s not even finished yet. For now, his microscope allows engineers to examine record grooves for scratches; eventually, the second arm will read the disc optically, without touching it.

Bergh’s previous machine used a laser to align warped wax cylinders to within microns and read the damaged cylinders without contact.

The library used it to retransfer the Mapleson Cylinder, recorded at the Metropolitan Opera in the early 1900s. They put on “unique performances by never-before-recorded singers.”

The paradox according to Mr. Willens is that as playback technology advances, original recordings continue to deteriorate.

Each year of waiting means there is less and less inheritance left to save.