Webinar Review – Keeping the Groove: Caring for Grooved Audio Media

In this short one hour webinar, Dave Walker, the Audiovisual Archivist at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, covers effective preservation strategies tailored specifically for grooved media. This webinar is free through the Connecting to Collections website along with a large archive of previous webinars over the past 15 years.

This is really a crash course on caring for grooved media. I learned a lot from this session, but audio specialists might not get out as much from this webinar. This will not teach you how to confidently identify and discern grooved media from one another, but it does explain the ideal conditions for each of the presented media. 

Walker begins by talking about wax cylinders. He explains that these were introduced in the 1880s as the first commercially available audio recordings. These are very susceptible to physical and environmental damage such as cracking from drying out, as well as fungal growth. Since these are made from a soft wax, when handling them it is important to rotate the cylinder so the heat from your hands doesn’t melt the wax. Wear and tear from playback can also deteriorate the cylinders quickly, so these are an excellent candidate for digitization. Digitizing these in-house can be very expensive and timely, so outsourcing digitization is a great idea. Walker also notes that there are state of the art machines designed specifically for the digitization of wax cylinders that can minimize physical contact with the cylinder. 

After the wax cylinders, we get into tricky territory. Walker shows examples of shellac 78s and explains that these look a lot like LPs and acetate discs. However, despite their similar function and appearance, these have different material composition. While all these discs should be kept at 4-12° C and 30-50% RH, they range drastically in their durability. Shellac 78s are made of a mix of organic and inorganic materials. The shellac is made from a secretion from a particular species of beetle which when interacting with water, can expand and damage the disc. For this reason, you should never clean shellac 78s with water. 

Shellac 78s can be quite fragile and prone to shattering, so it is important to handle them with care. However, lacquer disc (a.k.a. acetates, or instantaneous discs) are even more fragile. These comprise of a nitrocellulose or acetate coating layered over a core of aluminum, cardboard, or glass. As you can imagine, the glass core discs are particularly fragile, and while you can feel a difference in the weight of these discs, it is a good idea to exercise extra caution. Walker suggests only handling these with clean gloveless hands, since these should only be handled by the thin edges, gloveless hands will have maximum grip. 

LPs or Vinyl discs are the most durable of the media walker covers, but he reminds us to stay vigilant with these, as they can still be deteriorated by dust, oils and mould, and are often actually mislabeled 78s. 

One of the most interesting moments of this webinar came when Walker was discussing storage and housing. He explained that discs should be stored upright vertically on their edges in an archival grade sleeve and out of the original sleeve to prevent acid migration. This of course makes sense, but as someone with a museum studies background I was shocked to hear that archives might photograph the original sleeve and then discard it! Since this webinar was originally held over zoom, it seemed there was a split audience of archives and museum professionals and this divide of ideology (keeping everything or not) was interesting to see. 

If you would like to learn more about the care and best practices for grooved media, I recommend you check out this webinar. Even if just to see some audio oddities – X-ray records, anyone?

~Emilie