Digitizing ¼ tapes
The Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA) was founded in the 1970s with the mission to gather and preserve records pertaining to lesbian lives and activities. Located in Brooklyn, it is one of the oldest and largest archives devoted to lesbian history, holding more than 10,000 volumes, 1,400 periodicals, 12,000 photographs, 500 pulp novels, and several collections of original manuscripts and personal archival material. LHA has been digitizing audiovisual materials from its collections since 2010 through an ongoing collaboration with Professor Anthony Cocciolo and students at the Pratt Institute School of Information.
As a member of the audio digitization team for Projects in Digital Archives with Professor Cocciolo, I digitized ¼ inch open reel tapes. We used an open-reel tape deck, a Benchmark ADC1 USB - Analog to Digital Converter, and open-source editing software Audacity. The audio team digitized 37 ¼” open-reel tapes, and 27 were chosen by the curation team to be uploaded to the LHA website. Six were deemed unusable.
We worked through a number of challenges while digitizing the tapes. One challenge was poor audio quality because of how the recordings had been mic-ed. Some recordings were not really listenable and ultimately we chose not to use them for the website.
There were also significant preservation issues with a number of the tapes, due to age, deterioration, tape quality, and physical handling. Sometimes these issues caused the tape itself to snap. A frequent problem was that splices – that had been created to edit the tape – broke apart during playback because they were held together with adhesive tape that had dried out. We repaired those splices using archival audio splicing tape and adding leader tape where necessary. This process sometimes took hours for a single 30-minute recording.
The recordings are available on the Lesbian Herstory Archives website for audiovisual collections.