Retro-Printer Helping to Archive the Past
The Retro-Printer has been used by the University of Calgary to assist them in their preservation project.One of their main preservation projects has been to archive and preserve the wealth of media recordings made by EMI Music Canada over the years, with the aim of providing people with as much helpful information as possible and to give them meaningful and lasting ways to explore the archive.
The most challenging aspects of preserving the media recordings in the EMI Music Canada fonds arise from the sheer vastness, variety, and vulnerability of the recordings. There are approximately 40,000 individual recordings in nearly 40 formats. Some formats are relatively stable and can be accessed for many years without issue. Other formats are obscure, and it can be difficult to find working equipment for playing them.
It can be expensive and delicate work to preserve the content of a specific type of recording. Physical, mechanical, magnetic, and/or chemical factors can all play a role in the gradual decay of a recording. Equally important is the environment they are stored in and the ways in which the recordings have been treated by their creators.
With such a large archive to preserve, there is the need to consider efficiencies and cost effectiveness, including identification of which formats are better handled within the University itself, and which would need to be sent to specialist firms with extremely specialized or rare equipment.
As part of this, the University faced the challenge of archival transfers of PCM-1630 U-Matic audio tapes. The production masters for audio CDs were sent to the replication facility as digital audio stored on U-Matic video tapes. With thousands of recordings in this format, the University use the attached analyzer box which reports CRC error rates, track marks, and other information to help fine tune the preservation process.
The analyzer originally output data to a line printer which is not an economic purchase within budget constraints (even if a suitable printer could be found). The Retro-Printer module has been used instead and being able to capture that archival information as a .txt/.pdf has been invaluable for the University.
“I think one of the primary reasons the Retro-Printer is great is because even if we could print things out to a line printer, we’d just end up scanning it and doing OCR anyway”
Nathan Chandler, Senior Audiovisual Conservation Specialist, University of Calgary
Update November 2023
Since the above article was written, we have also now supplied a Retro-Printer to the National Library of Norway whom have an even larger music collection which they are archiving.
This also led us to develop an enhancement to the Retro-Printer whereby a long timeout (up to 90 minutes) could be used to watch for the end of a print job, but still allows the operator to manually signal the end of a print job using the offline button.
