The Library of Congress recently announced that its Preservation Directorate has reached an agreement with the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to carry out media preservation research.

The partnership will explore whether preservation methods for grooved media developed at the Berkeley lab can be successfully applied to the Library’s thousands of grooved discs and cylinders.

Researchers will collect data about media in various conditions — ranging from pristine to moldy — using 3-D surface imaging techniques, with the hope of eventually creating a system to improve access to recorded sound.

For more information, go to https://www.loc.gov/preserv.

— Bree Hocking