Hi Lou:

Your Stanford story is like the Ampex Museum. Stanford appears to be a black hole, where stuff goes 
to end up in a warehouse and never been accessible again. I had to pay Stanford a steep copying fee 
for a single schematic from the Ampex Museum files, and it came with a warning not to redistribute 
it, as if they own the copyright. The cautionary tale is this -- don't donate something to an 
archive if they give vague promises about "soon" digitizing or making things accessible to the 
public, if you care about public access to what you're donating. Get a timetable in writing, and be 
prepared to provide or raise funds for the digitization (ie endow your donation). I suppose a black 
hole warehouse is better than the landfill, but is it really?

-- Tom Fine

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lou Judson" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, September 10, 2015 12:13 PM
Subject: [ARSCLIST] Techs in the future - Re: [ARSCLIST] Article: Testing Old Tapes For Playability


Richard, I think this can become a very serious problem VERY soon. Are there people being trained 
anywhere, who gew up after the tape era basically ended?

I helped create to 40 year archive of radio interviews trhat got sent to Stanford with a promise 
that they would digitize them soon. “Soon” is now 15 years ago and no indications they will do it 
soon, or ever, and they are mostly on troublesome cheap sticky tape! It is osrt of as though a life’s 
work has been dumpstered!

We now “digitize” cassette copies just so we can distribute them… It’s a nonprofit so little 
funding…

(Matt, replies still go only to you so I changed to the list address.)
<L>
Lou Judson
Intuitive Audio
415-883-2689

On Sep 9, 2015, at 4:32 PM, Matt Sohn <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>  I think that the first failure will be the failure
> to find technicians who are familiar with the genre. I'll be in my mid
> 80s if I'm not pushing up daisies. Then there is the problem of machines
> and the people to repair the machines. Finally, the tape will fall
> apart, but, in general, tapes seem to be holding up well, even though
> many need baking.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Richard