By MARCELA CREPS
Thanks to a grant from the National Recording Preservation Foundation, rare and original recordings by Orson Welles will soon be digitized as part of the "Orson Welles on the Air" project.
In 1978, the Indiana University Libraries purchased a collection of recordings, papers, photos and more related to Welles. That collection included original lacquer discs containing 14 radio broadcasts of the "Orson Welles Show" and other recordings.
"Lacquer is chemically unstable," said Dan Figurelli, audio preservation engineer at IU's Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative.
IU's MDPI is hard at work preserving various recordings in the university's collection. While some are still in good shape, others have started to deteriorate. The discs have either an aluminum or glass base with a black lacquer coating. Sometimes, the chemicals used to create the recording begin to deteriorate, causing the coating to flake from the recording.
The state of the Welles recordings is still unclear. Erika Dowell, head of public services at the Lilly Library, said about 250 discs have already been digitized, with the grant covering the remaining 330 discs in the collection. The grant will also include the digitization of the scripts.
Dowell said an initial assessment has been made of the remaining discs to be digitized but no determination has been made if any are too degraded to be preserved.
Dowell said the Lilly Library had previously converted some of the discs to reel tape. But those original discs will be used for the digitization process.
"It should, if only because it's coming from the most original source," she said.
The digitization process involves the disc going through an initial cleaning process by audio visual technician Jonathan Richardson. Once it is cleaned, Richardson will then examine the disc, looking for damage through a microscope.