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Mickey Hart
Former Drummer, Grateful Dead; Member, Board of Trustees, U.S. Library of Congress American Folklife Center
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Q. Given the tremendous amounts of material at the Library of Congress and elsewhere, how does one go about setting priorities for preservation and access? Who decides what music to preserve and digitize?
A. We have to go to the endangerment issue again. You can't imagine what it's like taking these great archives into the digital domain. We have to identify the most endangered of the species and get them immediately into the digital domain. We have a very capable team of experts at the American Folklife Center that determines the at-risk portion of the collection, but it's hard to find out how at-risk it is without playing it, so it's kind of a catch-22. When you play it, it might just deteriorate on you. Some of the tapes we know are more volatile than others. The old wax cylinders and the wire recordings and the magnetic tapes hold up surprisingly well. It's not necessarily age, but how it was stored, the batch of material it was made of. It's a very difficult, pressing situation, a race against time. We're sitting with millions of hours of recorded material, and finding the money, expertise and technology to do this is the great challenge. The intersection between the Internet and this deteriorating media is really the issue here. The Internet was made for people with content, and at the Library, we really have content. We don't throw anything away. Besides the recorded sound, there's the text, the maps, the motion pictures… The Library is not just what you see, it goes 52 floors of storage underneath the ground. It looks like a battleship down there.
Q. How about creating access to the great works? Any chance of online access to early performances of Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin or the Beatles?
A. Everything that's been published lives at the Library of Congress because that's also where the copyright office is. We have all the Gershwin and Bernstein, all of the great works. The copyright and intellectual property issue is a hot one. You have to honor the intellectual property and the ownership issue. Some have been given to the library to be distributed free to the people. With others, we have to find who the rightful copyright owners are, and that's a real chase. When I was recording in Egypt, I would pay them for their performance but never find them again to give them their royalties. So what do you do? We put light bulbs into the Cairo Museum and brought music programs to the kids in Aswan. You have to find creative ways of giving it back. If you sell the music and it's agreed upon, then you have to return to the community not only money, but you must also get these recordings back to the community.
Q. Why spend effort on digital enhancement of old recordings, particularly since there is not yet a universally agreed upon standard for archiving and preserving analogue works?
A. There is no great all-purpose method now for digitizing, but we've got to get it into the digital domain while we can. Then we will migrate it yet again into another format because CD's and DAT tape only last so long. There are new technologies that we're toying with in the digital domain that will last, I don't know, forever is a long time but… We find that the best preservation now is on magnetic tape, which seems to be the most secure method. But every time you transfer from magnetic tape, you lose a generation of sound. So what we do is usually have two compact discs, one for preservation and one is a backup.
Q. Will global pop pushed forward by America Online, Time Warner and others drown these quiet voices out?
A. Some of them will be drowned out, and others will rise from the ashes. You have to seek out the more precious rhythms and the more precious music. People now understand that the world's music is something to be cherished and honored and to be thought of as a "world-class music." A lot of indigenous musicians are becoming virtuosos on their instruments. There's so much world music out there that you can't have one store. You go down the street to Virgin Megastore and see a very large world music section, but actually world music is gigantic compared to American pop music. There are limitless amounts of information out there. With the Internet you don't have to have large stockpiles of this, you can pick it up on demand. You can have music from New Guinea, Brazil, the Arctic Circle - whatever you want. I think that the Internet is a savior for world music, indigenous music and the archives from around the world. We're not just talking about the Library of Congress here, we're talking about the great repositories in Indiana, the Bishop Museum in Hawaii and the Soviet Union. All these incredible repositories out there now will be digitized and made available to you. It's not just preservation; it's access. There's no need to preserve something if you can't give it away or hear it. The Grateful Dead were always into giving it away; we might have started this whole thing. We thought it was a natural thing to let our fans tape our shows.
Q. When will Dead shows be available in the national digital library?
A. We're about to digitize the vault, a massive undertaking. We have close to 2,000 shows. I'm going to get it on; it's very dear to my heart and we're working on it right now as we speak. I've always wondered what it sounded like, so I'm going to get a chance, I hope in my lifetime, to hear what it sounded like.
Q. How can I get more information on the digital library project?
A. You can go to www.loc.gov or write to the American Folk Life Center at the Library of Congress for more information. I'd like to say this: please, make the Library of Congress a destination when you go to Washington. Walk into the main reading room and see if your heart doesn't beat a little faster. Come to the American Folk Life Center and put your head under some earphones and it'll take you there.
