| A virulent mould is destroying
the magic moments that were captured on audio and VHS cassettes
in the 1980s and 1990s
A virulent infection is destroying the audio and videotapes
once used to capture important moments of family life and
great historic events. The fungal blight, or 'tape mould',
has already ruined thousands of miles of audio and video tape
in Britain and, according to specialist restorers, much more
is likely to be deteriorating, unobserved, in storage. The
infection of VHS cassettes and of the audio cassettes popular
in the 1980s and 1990s is increasing at an alarming rate.
'We used to get around one or two cases
a year, and now about 10 per cent of all the work that is
sent to us is mouldy. But sadly there is nothing we can do
about it here,' said Chris Frear, who runs a restoration business
in Scotland.
The wet summers of the last three years
have taken the problem to epidemic proportions.
'It has got to the stage that we open up
all the packages of tapes we are sent in a separate room,
away from our playing equipment and then we wash and disinfect
our hands, because it is so contagious. If it got on to the
tape heads in our machines, it would spread everywhere. It's
almost like the measles.'
Tapes of family footage stored inside cardboard
boxes in damp domestic cellars or lofts are at particular
risk, but curators of larger private and public archives are
also often unaware that damp conditions or temperature variations
can allow one infected item to decimate an entire collection.
'We do see tapes with fungal growth, and
if we catch it early enough we can often save the recording,'
said Nigel Bewley, head sound engineer at the British Library
Sound Archive in London. 'We use a quarantine room and send
mouldy tape away to be sterilised first, often through a process
of irradiation. The danger is that live spores could reach
the rest of our collection.'
Video and audio tape is made from cellulose
coated with ferric oxide, but, just like the sticky tape on
an old parcel, it dries out and becomes brittle with age.
Modern techniques can combat this ageing process, allowing
the tapes to be digitally copied, but mould that has eaten
into a tape is defeating conservationists. Typically tapes
with the fatal fungus look as if they are covered with a fine
white dust.
'Mould is a much more serious thing than
snapped or worn tapes, and it's heartbreaking to have to ring
up a customer who was so thrilled to have at last found a
missing tape, just to tell them its unplayable,' said Beth
Frear, who works with her son in their family business, Precious
Voices, based in Dumfries and Galloway.
'A typical museum collection is just boxes
on a shelf or in an ill-ventilated store cupboard. Few curators
realise the material is degrading all the time and think that
it will keep until some miraculous budget bonus will allow
them to digitise it,' said Frear.
Yet the value of preserving personal recordings
may be impossible to estimate. 'It's hard to pick out special
examples - but there was a gentleman in the British diplomatic
service who had been under siege in his residence during the
partition of Pakistan into the present Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Each day he had rung around his British friends to see if
they were still alive and recorded their phone conversations
on his reel-to-reel machine. It's all terribly stiff upper-lipped,
but there, blow by blow, is a daily account of who was attacked
and who had been mortared in the previous 24 hours.'
The Frears have rescued many aural histories,
including the account of the life of a stallion walker who
led a shire stallion from farm to farm to breed the horses
for ploughing and a recording of a Scottish kippering girl
who tells of her gruelling work in the 1870s and 1880s, following
the herring fleet as it moved south each year from Aberdeen
to Lowestoft.
'Just in the last few days we had our first
birth recording,' said Frear. 'It was taped in Brazil in the
1960s and is a blow by blow account of the journey to hospital,
the birth of the baby and its first cries.'
The British Library Sound Archive advises
that all stored tapes, audio, visual and computer, should
be kept in the dark, away from heat sources and with no extreme
temperature fluctuations.
Save your souvenirs
VHS and audio tape should not be stored
in:
- garden sheds
- lofts, cellars or anywhere where
the temperature fluctuates
Tapes should be kept:
- in the dark
- away from direct heat sources
- labelled in a cool cupboard that is heated
during the winter
How to deal with tape mould
- Look for a fine white dust
- Don't blow it away across the rest of
your collection
- Don't play the damaged tape (you could
infect the machine)
- Don't throw away mouldy cardboard casings
or surrounding storage boxes without noting down the details
of the recording, such as the date, location and names
- Do not place near other newer tapes
- Wash your hands thoroughly after touching
infected tape
- Send partially damaged tapes for professional
sterilisation (either through irradiation or in an oxygen
vacuum). The dead spores can then be delicately brushed
away. The tape should be cleaned with swansdown, which is
a lint-free cloth
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