National Public Radio's
All Things Considered ran a segment about the efforts by preservationists to transfer audio recordings to a durable medium that would last far into the future. The medium they had decided upon: shellac (what Edison used when he first invented recording technology back in the nineteenth century). Rick Karr reported:
The format needs to be reliably re-created and understood by civilizations 50, 100 or even 1,000 years from now. But thanks to a grant from the Smolian-Giovannoni Foundation, all of these audio formats are being transferred onto 10-inch wide, 78 rpm shellac disks—the one rock-solid format archivists have identified that works every time.
And so works such as Vanilla Ice's debut CD were being painstakingly transferred onto shellac. The report concluded: "If funding levels can be maintained, experts estimate the archiving project can catch up with recordings made before 2003 by April 1, 2089."
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2003
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