Inside the New York ‘time machine’ racing to save a century of sound and film

He and his colleagues at the New York Public Library (NYPL) are working against the clock to preserve the contents of film, tape, discs and cylinders that hold more than a century of sound and moving images. 

The records are decaying, and the machines that can play them are disappearing.

For Mr. Dostaly, it’s not just about technology. He has watched other people’s lives unfold through the archive. 

Harry Belafonte, the legendary American singer, actor, civil rights activist – and longtime UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador – filmed his family for decades, from teaching his son to ride a bike in Central Park to trips abroad. 

“I’ve actually seen his kids from toddlers all the way to adults,” Mr. Dostaly said.

Films of the African American civil rights leader Malcolm X’s travels, including footage from Mecca, moved him the most. “I’m the one who’s going to be making it available for everyone to see,” he remembered thinking.

By looking through footage like this – he hopes – young people “will realize the importance of events that took place before they were here on Earth.”

Next door, Casey McNamara, a media preservation coordinator, bends over a reel of film with a jeweller’s loupe or magnifying glass, checking it frame by frame for tears, splices and shrinkage. 

On the white leader she has written “BHARATA NATYAM,” the name of one of the oldest Indian classical dance forms.

Films may reach her “in a rusty tin, on an old projection reel, or in a rag box, in plastic bags.” Without the work she does, some collections “would remain mostly unseen.”

The lab is part of NYPL’s Digital Collections Operations. Once digitized, most of the material will be accessible to anyone with a library card. 

 “The tapes and the decks are no longer being manufactured, but the history needs to be preserved,” explained lab manager Shahed Dowlatshahi.

Work like this is exactly the kind of project that the UN’s World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, marked annually on 27 October, is designed to highlight and assist.

In the audio room, Jeffrey Willens slides a 16-inch disc from a brown paper sleeve marked: A Year To Remember.

The UN Radio Division produced it for broadcast on New Year’s Day 1949, when the Organization was still headquartered at Lake Success on Long Island. 

Copies would have been mailed to radio stations and UN offices around the world. Mr. Willens places it on a turntable with a microscope mounted above it, and the voices of actor Fredric March and sportscaster Ted Husing fill the room.

Down the corridor, engineers are digitizing the archive of William Greaves, a pioneering African American documentary filmmaker. 

His 2001 film Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey tells the story of the American diplomat who won the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the armistice agreements between Israel and Arab States. 

Mr. Bunche was the first Black Nobel laureate and later became UN Under-Secretary-General.

Time is working against all of it. 

The acetate film which the New York Public Library is trying to preserve suffers from “vinegar syndrome,” a chemical decay that leaves it brittle, warped and smelling of vinegar. 

“Once that process starts, there’s no stopping it,” Ms. McNamara said. “You can slow it down with cold storage, but it will never reverse.”

Audiotape can arrive crinkled or stuck together and must be repaired by hand. “To be able to repair it and then play it and get a successful transfer is kind of like surgery,” said media preservation engineer Victoria Fajardo. “It really is such a privilege to be one of the first people to listen to a lot of this content for the first time since it’s been recorded.”

Even Digital Betacam cassettes, once considered robust, have started to shed. Francis Dougherty, the specialist who originally built the video lab, now has to clean his deck between tapes. “Every year this job gets more difficult,” he said. “Every year physical media degrades.”

“The machines are getting rarer,” Mr. Dougherty added. “The old men who repair the machines are getting even rarer.”

Asked how urgent the work is, he does not hesitate: “It should have been dealt with 20 years ago.”

Universities train young specialists but there are fewer and fewer machines for them to work on.

“Without people to maintain and repair and service them, we won’t be able to do this,” Mr. Dowlatshahi added. “And there’s only a few people that do it now.”

Some solutions are built by hand. The turntable that played the UN disc was made by Nick Bergh, a California engineer who builds playback machines as “sort of a hobby.” The library has one of the first in the world.

It isn’t even finished. For now, its microscope lets engineers inspect record grooves for scratches; eventually, a second arm will read discs optically, without touching them.

Bergh’s earlier machine uses lasers to align warped wax cylinders to within microns and to read broken ones without contact. 

The library used it to re-transfer the Mapleson Cylinders, recorded at the Metropolitan Opera in the early 1900s. They hold “unique performances by singers who were never otherwise recorded.”

The paradox according to Mr. Willens is that as playback technology improves, the original recordings keep deteriorating. 

Every year of waiting means less heritage left to save.