Saving Sounds That Define Us
President Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats, Duke Ellington's music and the Rev. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech are among the first 50 items placed on a national registry of sounds which opened Monday.
Other recordings will be added to the list later, the way films are added to an existing registry. Both are overseen by the Library of Congress.
Under a law passed in 2000, the new registry must "maintain and preserve sound recordings that are culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Those items include records made by inventor Thomas A. Edison in the 1880s and the first recordings of American Indian music.
William Ivey, former head of the National Endowment for the Arts, will chair the board of directors for the National Recording Preservation Foundation, which will accept private gifts and grants to maintain the sounds.
The registry is an addition to the 2.5 million sounds already preserved by the Library of Congress, everything from the huffing and puffing of a steam locomotive to instructions for teaching a parakeet to talk. There's also President Theodore Roosevelt denouncing corporate swindles, Robert Frost reading his poetry and "Buffalo Bill" Cody urging war with Spain over Cuba.
The library isn't the only government repository for sounds; the National Archives and Records Administration has tens of thousands of hours of Capitol Hill speeches, committee hearings and other events. But the library's collection is the most dynamic and diverse. About 100,000 recordings, new and old, arrive in an average year.
The collection has grown so large that the sounds, along with the library's enormous photo archive, will be moved to a new 41-acre complex in Culpeper, Va., about 70 miles southwest of Washington. Storage space is being built into the side of a small mountain, with construction aimed at completion in three years.
Anything stored in Culpeper will be accessible via computer at the library's Madison Building in Washington.
The library, in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution, has a pilot project called "Save Our Sounds" that seeks to preserve recordings such as those made on wax cylinders by inventor Thomas A. Edison and others done on acetate discs in the early 20th century.
"We have every format you can imagine and every problem with every format," said Michael Taft, who helps run the program. "What we have to do is find a way of taking sound off of all of these different media and storing them as computer files in such a way that they will be readable and accessible not just today, but 100, 200 years from now."
Some of the recordings are so fragile that the simple act of playing them can be damaging. And technicians still are learning how best to "digitize" sounds. One of the stumbling blocks is finding standards that will ensure that sounds don't lose their original form when transferred to computer files.
"We don't clean up our recordings in the sense of getting all the pops and clicks and cracks out of them," Taft said. "These recordings are artifacts in themselves. You don't erase part of a painting on a Grecian urn because you didn't like it or it didn't fit what you thought was aesthetic."
Setting priorities on what to save first also is difficult.
"We have to make judgments on what's important," Taft said, "and a hundred years from now some researcher may find we failed to save the one thing he wanted."
Allan B. McConnell Jr., the library's top sound engineer, said it's tough to find technicians with the expertise to work with old sounds and new technology.
"There's plenty of computer whiz kids," McConnell said. "But they don't know the turntables - they don't know how to do a wax cylinder or are even interested, for that matter. I may have six turntables sitting there, but if I can't keep them running, they're no good."
The Library of Congress got it first recording nearly a century ago. It's a short speech by German Emperor Wilhelm II, the "Kaiser Bill" who launched World War I a decade later.
Theodore Roosevelt was the first president whose speeches were recorded. The library has samples of every president since, including dozens by Franklin Roosevelt, inventor of the "fireside chats," which also reside at the library.
Federal law requires that any copyrighted sound be stored at the library. Those that librarians judge will be in demand are kept easily available. A recent example: man-in-the-street interviews after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The library gets gifts of old collections and buys some. It has been collecting oral histories for years, including 12 hours of reminiscences from the last survivors of slavery.
More recently it has emphasized recollections of war veterans. About 4,500 have been recorded, 2,500 of them from World War II servicemen.
By Carl Hartman