Date:         Tue, 23 May 2006 19:14:37 -0400
Reply-To:     Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List
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Sender:       Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List
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From:         "Richard L. Hess" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:      Re: Triage, heroic efforts, and economics
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At 05:42 PM 5/23/2006, Karl Miller wrote:
>On Tue, 23 May 2006, Richard L. Hess wrote:
>
> > The 7,000 cassettes and reels stored with nightly relative humidity
> > spikes up to 75% at the Cal State Fullerton Center for Oral and
> > Public History were copied to two gold CD-Rs with some help from me
> > to set things up. I tried to get them interested in adding this to
> > their IT infrastructure, but was told it couldn't happen.
>
>Do you recall what their thinking was...

No budget and no champion who understood the project. The CDRs were 
done essentially for the cost of the CDRs and a few Dragons and a 
couple of years' lease on a pair of A807s. All the labour was free.

> > While preserving commercial releases is very important as well,
> > hopefully additional copies of these survive at diverse geographic
> > locations. The material that worries me the most are the single 
> copy archives.
>
>I would agree, but to my question, if you had a donor, what would be the
>best use one could make of say, a gift of $5-10M?

It depends - perhaps the best thing would be to set up an archival 
store of multiple tens or a hundred TB (or expandable to that) plus 
an annuity to pay for the ongoing support plus an annuity to pay for 
incremental digitization.


Richard L. Hess                   email: [log in to unmask]
Aurora, Ontario, Canada       (905) 713 6733     1-877-TAPE-FIX
Detailed contact information: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.