The scourge of tape mould and laser rot

[Guest guest]

The scourge of tape mould and laser rot

Globe and Mail - Canada*

RUSSELL SMITH

August 7, 2008

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080807.wrussell0

7/BNStory/Entertainment

In Britain, media have been reporting a strange mould affecting

audiotape and videotape. Thousands of kilometres of magnetic tape

have already been destroyed by the dust-like substance, and many

museums and archives may not know it yet, as they have not opened

their boxes of old cassettes for years. The mould is so hardy that

it spreads easily, so if you touch one contaminated tape and then

handle another, you are likely to infect it too.

One ish archival preservation company, quoted in the Telegraph,

said it was implementing practices reminiscent of biology labs: Its

employees open packages of tapes in one room, then wash their hands

before moving to the room with the playback equipment, for fear of

getting the fungus on the playing heads. If it gets into the

machines, it could spread everywhere. Now, librarians and archivists

are creating quarantine rooms for mouldy tapes.

No one is quite sure what is causing the white taint on the tapes,

but it has been suggested that it is prevalent in Britain because of

damp conditions. Internet skeptics are challenging the media

reports, saying it's not yet clear that it is caused by a single

fungus.

Whatever the matter, it's news because it reminds us all of the

essential instability of all our media. We have tended to think, for

the past few decades, that each technological development has given

us more space for storage, and so was an improvement: Audio

cassettes were smaller than vinyl, and unscratchable; videotapes

were much easier to use, and less vulnerable to damage, than

celluloid film was. A two-hour videotape was also much smaller than

a two-hour film reel.

So everyone went off in the eighties and transferred all their old

Super-8 home movies onto video cassettes. It was thought to give

them some permanence, enter them into archives somehow, the way

newspapers are shrunk into microfilm.

But videotape turned out to be highly impermanent. Now, one's

videotapes must be transferred into a digital medium, put on a hard

drive somehow (although we still can't agree on what format will

become the universal one) - and not just because the tape medium is

obsolete, but because the tapes are actually dying.

Think you're safe with all your movies on DVDs? Think again: " Laser

rot " can affect old CDs and DVDs. They are coated with an aluminum

surface to make them more reflective; the aluminum can oxidize and

degrade. " CD bronzing " is a form of this: If your CD isn't playing

well, and the playing surface is going brown, it has become

irretrievably corroded. In fact, all digital media are prone to some

kind of decay: Flash memory cards are also subject to a change in

electrical charge that will cause bits to disappear.

So the problem of how to store all of human history forever still

has not been solved. The tape-mould problem reminds us of the

essential impermanence of even the newest media. Librarians and

archivists still agree that the most stable storage medium for

information is ink on paper; you can even soak it with water and

much of it will remain readable. It is also impervious to changes

in " platform " ; in other words, although printing and writing

technology have changed dramatically over the centuries, a book

printed using 16th-century technology can still be easily read by

any user. We don't have to find a 16th-century viewing-machine to

see it through.

That simplicity is threatened, even in the publishing industry. I

recently completed a book, printed it and gave the manuscript to my

agent. To give it to a publisher, she wanted it in a digital

version, so I gave her a Word file. When she opened it on her

computer, it was full of garbage characters. There had been some

problem in the document conversions among several programs. I

couldn't fix it.

But I said no problem, at least we have the print version. No good,

she said: Editors want to read new manuscripts on e-readers now;

they don't want paper. Although I had a perfectly clear manuscript,

readable in bright sunshine and on the beach, it was useless. It was

in an obsolete format.

Furthermore, ink and paper can't preserve moving images or sound.

For that, we must rely on variations on treated plastic: chemical

colours through which we shine a light; magnetic particles arrayed

in a certain order; tiny pits impressed on a disc. It is perhaps

fitting, even poetic, that moving images are more unstable than all

others. It's hard to even define what we're trapping when we record

sound: traces of invisible shock waves that cause their own shock

waves when activated. It's philosophically weird, so not really

surprising that it's volatile.

I recently threw away a stack of valuable 78 rpm records, containing

rare performances by Enrico Caruso, among others, because I was

unable to sell them on eBay. Who has the playback capacity? And now

I read, in online discussions of the tape-mould problem, the joking

suggestion that we start dumping all our sound recordings onto

grooved vinyl discs. It's such a stable medium.