Soon, these will all be unplayable, even for one-time digitizing efforts. So much history is kept on these, both of personal and public record. Music, interviews, documentation, even data such as programs and files for computers that utilized them as a primary media for loading and saving (Commodore comes to mind in particular).

Here is a great article on efforts and techniques to expedite the process of tape archival. From the article:

“The Cultural Heritage Index estimates that there are 46 million magnetic tapes (VHS, cassette, and others) in museums and archives in the U.S. alone—and about 40% of them are of unknown quality. Many of these tapes are reaching the end of their playable lifetime, and given the limited number of studio-quality tape players available for the digitizing process, not all the tapes will be digitized before the world loses them.”

Tagged with: cassette | history | tape archival

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