An ATR-FTIR and ESEM study on magnetic tapes for the assessment of the degradation of historical audio recordings

tThis article presents some approaches for chemical and physical characterization of materials (ATR-FTIR and ESEM) applied to a specific category of cultural material, magnetic tapes. Analogue recordingon magnetic tape has been the main technique for capturing sound for about five decades in the pastcentury. Most of our collective memory is therefore stored on this type of medium, which is unfortunatelydegrading very fast. The past twenty years have witnessed a true rush to digitization in order to savethe information stored on tape, but many aspects of the physical recovery of damaged carriers are stillperformed without solid scientific knowledge, leaving space for improvised treatments with unexpectedill effects. The main motivations for this study are that the preservation of sound recordings is an urgentmatter that belongs to the field of Intangible Cultural Heritage preservation, the scientific literature on thesubject is scarce and little known by the non-scientific archival world, and the documented approaches totapes recovery are currently fragmented and do not provide an exhaustive reference for the operators inthis field. The analyses presented in this article aim at paving the way for the establishment of a scientificprotocol for the safe recovery of damaged tapes.