Preservation and Digitization: “UC San Diego to Salvage the “Lost” Audio Recordings of Polio Vaccine Pioneer Jonas Salk”

From the San Diego Union-Tribune:

The idea-a-minute Jonas Salk didn’t always have time to capture his thoughts on the yellow legal pads he always kept within arm’s reach.
So he spent hour after hour talking into an audio recorder when he was developing the world’s first effective polio vaccine and creating the now famous research institute in La Jolla that bears his name.
Most of those recordings haven’t been heard in at least 50 years. But that will soon change. UC San Diego has asked a specialty company to digitize more than 170 hours of recordings that were made on an audograph, a clunky device that became obsolete long ago.
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“It is one of the most significant collections we hold and now we can use a newer technology to make the content available for the first time in at least 50 years,” said Lynda Claassen, director of the Mandeville Special Collections at UC San Diego’s Geisel Library.

Learn More, Read the Complete Article
See Also: Jonas Salk Papers Finding Aid (via UCSD Lib
https://library.ucsd.edu/speccoll/findingaids/mss0001.html

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Digital Preservation, Journal Articles, Libraries, News, Preservation