Regents of the University of California, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Working with the Library of Congress, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory partners with The Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, The University of Chicago’s South Asia Library, The Berlin Phonogramm Archive, The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, the Edison National Historic Site, and the University of Applied Science, Fribourg, Switzerland, to build on the success of the “3D/PRISM” or “IRENE-3D” project previously funded by IMLS. The goals of this cooperative agreement are to enable institutions that hold rare early sound recordings made on wax cylinders to be recovered and digitally re-mastered even when the original cylinder is cracked or broken and can no longer be played. Project activities include research tasks focused on archival workflow, field operation, special materials studies, and further technical development to be carried out through a series of national and international collaborations. A software control and analysis framework will also be designed and evaluated to address large scale digitization of collections. For collections that are remote or not transportable, a mobile 2D scanning device will be built and evaluated in a remote application. In addition, a measurement study will be made on copper “galvano” cylinder molds from the Berlin Phonogramm Archive, and a collection of rare and unusual experimental recordings created by Alexander Graham Bell in the early 1880’s, from the collection of the Smithsonian Institution, will be studied. Software tools and measurement strategies for the virtual reassembly of broken cylinders and discs will be evaluated. The latter will include a measurement of the (broken) Dickson Cylinder, Thomas Edison’s 1893 attempt to synchronize film and audio. The range of special studies has been chosen both to address key aspects of the technology development and to gauge the potential benefit to these and other important special collections.