Precious Jewels Preserved by digitization


Waltraud Hug, digitizing one of the 800 analog tapes of CERN conferences.

The User and Document Services Group of the IT Department (IT-UDS) has been digging through the archives and found some buried treasure. For 30 years all conferences and seminars taking place in CERN main auditorium, the largest lecture hall in Geneva for many years, were taped using analog format for audio recording. The IT-UDS Audio, Visual and Conferencing Services are currently digitising these jewels and making them available on the Internet.

Eight hundred of these analog open-reel tapes were stored in the archiving vault beneath the CERN Main Auditorium. As the years pass there is a danger that they will deteriorate to such an extent that they are lost forever. They span from 1959 until the mid-1980s and feature topics such as speeches by CERN Directors-General, relativity, transcendental meditation, Apollo 9, birth control, Vietnam and Annapurna, to name but a few. These conferences were mainly organized by the Staff Association, and professors and speakers from all over the world asked or were requested to present various topics.

'You feel as if you were part of the audience when you listen to them', said Thomas Baron, Head of the Audio, Visual and Conferencing Services section (AVC). 'It's possible to hear the speakers moving about on stage to answer questions.'

'On some of the tapes you can hear the speaker asking the audience not to smoke because it's bothering him/her', said Waltraud Hug, main actor of this digitization process. 'This was back when people were allowed to smoke in the Auditorium!'

The project to transfer all of the tapes into digital format which will preserve them forever, began in June 2005. The Revox B77 MK2 analog recorder, a 20-year-old machine, is still in working order. Tapes are played on it and the output is captured on an acquisition card in a computer. Special software is used to transfer the analog signal into a WAV/PCM file, an uncompressed format, thus a large file. This is kept in the archive at CERN, but the file is also converted into Ogg Vorbis, compressed in more compact formats that are made available on the CDS and then loaded onto the website for public access. According to Baron, the perceived audio quality is similar in both the WAV and Ogg compressed formats. Ogg has two benefits: one is that it's an open format. The other is that Ogg is universal, making it a user-friendly file, though some computers may need to download a plug-in.

Baron hopes to begin the second phase of the project this year, which will involve digitizing thousands of videos made from the second half of the 1980s until the present day and uploading them onto the website. 'This priceless archive constitutes the memory of the Organization and should not be lost' said Baron. 'This project aims to prevent the demise of multimedia archives and give them a long life in electronic format, with the added benefit of making them accessible to everyone at CERN.'

Thanks to this digitization project more than 210 of the presentations are already available for public listening on the CERN Document Server (CDS) website found at: http://cdsweb.cern.ch/?c=Audio+Archives