The Recorded Sound Collection of the Library of Congress - an editorial about digitizing NBC documents

I'd like to share some observations about some experiences I've had at the Library of Congress. On the one hand, I've been amazed at the treasures found there, even in regard to such an obscure piece of radio history as the Empire Builders series. However, I've encountered some obstacles that I find really disturbing. I'm hoping that by explaining what I've run into, perhaps someone reading this blog can weigh in and let me know if I'm barking up the wrong tree here or not.

Many of the continuities for the Empire Builders series were archived by NBC on microfilm (the NBC Masterbooks) back in the 1950’s, as I understand it, which was then transferred to new microfilm in the 1970’s by the Library of Congress (or done by NBC prior to being gifted to the LOC). The LOC recently has been digitizing all of these microfilm files onto microform data, but my own experience with this 3^rd-generation replication is disappointing in the extreme.

I can’t say with certainty, but it is my impression that the most recent effort to digitize the material has resulted in an abhorrently poor quality of washed out imagery – completely useless. The 2^nd generation microfilm from the 1970’s – available to researchers up until about a year ago – certainly had its own shortcomings. But again in my own experience, it seems like the digitization has washed out the marginally readable images to a point that they cannot be read at all, in many cases.

Personally, I really think the LOC should have insisted on some form of quality control assurances from whomever they hired to ruin, er, digitize the microfilm. Maybe they did, but what I’ve seen does not give me a warm fuzzy about it. At best, some of the material is still legible and can be saved by a researcher onto a thumb drive, or emailed to oneself (albeit a wonderful gain in convenience and expense over the laborious and costly alternative of printing the material off an antiquated microfilm reader one page at a time). However, if the result is that a significant percentage of the material is now completely unusable, we have gained nothing and lost much.

If you have had a different experience with this material, I would appreciate your sharing what you know about the NBC Masterbooks at the LOC. It’s extremely costly to me, in both time and money, to travel to the LOC and spend days at a time trying to find and retain copies of the materials that I earnestly want to work with. I can’t afford to keep going there if the results promise to be so abysmal.