Museum Curators first cataloged the damaged wooden box containing the wax cylinders in 1957, found in the library of the Edison Laboratory. In 2005, the National Park Service completed a multi-year project to individually catalog every historic sound recording in the museum collection. Curators noted that the box contained 17 brown wax cylinders in fair and poor condition, several broken with large pieces missing. No title list or other identification survived in the box with the recordings, so the recordings could not be identified until they were heard. In 2011, the park's Curator of Sound Recordings digitized 12 of Wangemann's 17 cylinders using a French-made Archeophonecylinder playback machine, saving the audio as Broadcast Wave Format files. (Five of the cylinders could not be digitized due to their condition.) Once the audio could be heard, historians Stephan Puille and Patrick Feaster identified the sounds and wrote two scholarly essays, which are included with the recordings on the Thomas Edison National Historical Park website.

As Atlantic Monthly points out, this release also include the only known recordings of an individual born in the 18th century, German military strategist Helmuth von Moltke. You can listen to the recordings online.[InfoDocket, via Free Government Information]

— Shari Laster, University Libraries, The University of Akron. Photo: Phonatic / Wikimedia

LibraryLab posts come courtesy of the American Library Association member interest group Library Boing Boing.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/03/07/listening-to-the-past-nps-rel.html/feed 5 http://boingboing.net/2011/12/15/announcing-library-boing-b.html http://boingboing.net/2011/12/15/announcing-library-boing-b.html#comments Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:47:51 +0000 Rob Beschizza http://boingboing.net/?p=134453 Folks from the American Library Association are launching a member interest group called Library Boing Boing, and we're delighted to give our blessing. From Jenny Levine's announcement, at the ALA's Marginalia site:

On the one hand, Library Boing Boing

Folks from the American Library Association are launching a member interest group called Library Boing Boing, and we're delighted to give our blessing. From Jenny Levine's announcement, at the ALA's Marginalia site:

On the one hand, Library Boing Boing is a collaboration between ALA and the fabulously amazing Boing Boing folks to highlight all of the great new things libraries are doing. The most visible result will be regular posts about those great new things on the Boing Boing site itself.

On the other hand, Library Boing Boing: The Group has its own goals to help happy mutants in local communities connect with their happy mutant librarians to do good, work together on our shared interests, and make the world more better.

Once they're up and running, we'll be publishing regular updates on the group's activities and plans, as well as any events and programs that you can attend or support. For ALA members. the first step would be to sign the ALA member petition to formally establish the Library Boing Boing Member Interest Group; everyone else, watch this space.

ALA Happy Mutants rejoice – Library Boing Boing is coming! [ALA Marginalia]]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/12/15/announcing-library-boing-b.html/feed 8