NEDCC STORY - October 2016

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HIDDEN GEMS:

The IRENE Technology Helps Preserve a Lost Native Alaskan Dialect



In 2013, the Oral History Program at University of Alaska Fairbanks received an audio mystery in a box . . .



The receipt of four fragile glass-base discs began a process of discovery for Curator Leslie McCartney and Collections Manager Robyn Russell. "With audio collections, you can't look in the table of contents - you can't thumb through them like a book to find out what it contains. You have to have playback," says Robyn Russell. "We knew that these recordings were unique and we could see that they were extremely fragile. We didn't dare put a stylus to them. They were essentially hidden gems."



Enter IRENE, the new audio preservation technology developed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and tested at the Library of Congress. The IRENE system takes ultra-high resolution photographs of the grooves on discs or cylinders and software translates the images into sound - all without touching the object's fragile grooves.



Now that Leslie and Robyn have heard the intriguing voices from the past on these recordings, their research has taken them back to WWII and the island of Attu, the westernmost island in the Aleutian chain - and to the little-known story of the island's residents during the War and after.



READ MORE:

https://www.nedcc.org/about/nedcc-stories/attu-audio



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Northeast Document Conservation Center

www.nedcc.org

Join NEDCC in Supporting the Preservation of America's Collections with

Crowdfunding for Preservation:

https://www.nedcc.org/crowdfunding/crowdfunding-for-preservation





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