Now to give you some background of the sort of recordings we deal with here at Sound Archives/Nga Taonga Korero (the Treasures of Speech). Radio New Zealand comprises National Radio and Concert FM (music). Up until about 15 years ago it also featured the commercial network which was sold off to private networking.
We are a radio broadcasting archive so our collections are predominantly programmes that have gone to air, even though we do have many tapes that are unedited raw interviews that a producer has used to compile the completed programme. The types of programmes we have are news and current affairs, radio serials, radio comedy, World War II recordings, sport of many genres, New Zealand composer's collections, all kinds of music programmes, disasters, Maori programming, Parliamentary broadcasts, early Newsreels, etc. This list could go on! We do accession collections from private individuals to other radio stations and educational institutions, plus we actively record other radio stations around NZ on a daily basis to get a cross sample of the types of broadcasts people are listening to all our the country.
Our collections are used by all sorts of places from advertising agencies, journalists, schools, students, television to private individuals. A journalist may use a short cut of historical interest to compliment their story or television may use our audio in a documentary especially if it pre-dates television here as radio WAS the only source of audio. We often get requests from private individuals about a relative who performed on the radio many years ago and it's always nice to find those but, sadly, many of those went straight to air and weren't recorded unless they were quite famous!
Copyright is a big issue and we have to be very careful about supplying audio that contains music. As a rule, anything that is commercially released we don't provide unless the client gets the correct permissions and clearances, which is a real process but can be done.
The Mobile Unit World War Two recordings are very interesting. These were made overseas and feature soldiers messages home, entertainment for the troops, speeches from high ranking military, etc. Because of the sensitive nature of war the soldiers messages would be written down and checked for security reasions. They would line up and then make their recording which would be played over the wireless on a Sunday night once they got back to NZ. However, before they went to air, they would be checked by the War Department to see if those soldiers were still alive. If they had been killed in action then the family would be invited in to have a private listening and it wouldn't be played to the general public. We have a disk cutter which could have been the one used at the time, remembering these disks were cut as they were made. There is a rather famous one made by Arch Curry, war correspondent, and he is describing the Battle of Cassino. His voice is very calm and factual as he describes the big bombers going overhead, which you can hear and then the eventual bomb being dropped. Interestingly, this recording was despatched by horseback (from what I am told) and made its way to the BBC and was broadcast with 24 hours of the battle. Not like these days with the internet but amazing in itself.
An interesting project I am working on at the moment is rather unique in itself. An ex-broadcaster donated his personal collection to us and in it were three "reels" containing paper tape. The unique thing about these reels is that he used six laquer transcription disks to make three open reel reels! He has drilled extra holes in the middle and made a wooden hub and bolted them together! The paper tape (sound mirror) is brittle and full of splices and my challenge is to get them off his "reels" and transfer them to standard 10.5" reels. They have been stored poorly and are all squashed down on one side making the tape very difficult to release itself freely from each layer. It does have sound on it also which makes it even more exciting!
Next installment coming soon!
Marie
