The sights and sounds of our "National Jukebox" are great fun, but how many websites also give you a behind the scenes look at the technology and talent that make it all possible? How did they take a huge pile of dusty old 78 rpm acoustical discs and transform them into a digitized collection of recordings, easily available to anyone with an internet connection?
When you go to www.loc.gov/jukebox, scroll down until you find the "How'd They Do That?" heading, under which you will see three clickable links. The first takes you to a fascinating, extensively captioned slide show. After starting the show, you can enlarge the photos by clicking on any one of them. This will make it necessary to scroll down for the captions, but will enable a closer, clearer image of the equipment. For a deeper understanding of "acoustical recordings" and "takes," return to the list for links to pages giving expanded explanations of these key terms.
What next? We'll be heading in a whole new direction. See you soon!
This is the 4th installment of a series of articles about the early sound recordings preserved and presented on the Library of Congress website. These reports were written by M.Cole, Reference Librarian