CERN has been recording audio tracks on cassettes and open reel tapes from 1956 up to 2004.
A first digitization action was performed in 2016 with the most urgent material: Council and Committee of Council collections. It was composed of 804 C60 cassettes, 204 C90 cassettes and 687 open reel tapes. This total of 1695 carriers corresponded to approximately 2000 hours of speeches.
A second action was run in 2017 to complete the digitization for all the other CERN official committees that were recorded since their birth. In general, the recordings were performed for the needs of the CERN translation service in charge of producing minutes of the meetings. About 2’725 additional compact audio cassettes and 4’145 open reel tapes were identified as part of CERN patrimony.
In addition, a few hundred carriers is composed with interviews of personalities working in the laboratory.
The goal of both actions was to ensure the sustainability of the recordings. They were processed by external contractors with the mandate to provide CERN with files in WAV format 16 bit 48 kHz as well as access files (mp3 and ogg open source formats). The access is nevertheless restricted to the CERN archivists, who can set the rules for access on demand by individuals.
This project has been possible thanks to the support of the CERN Council, and a fruitful collaboration between the CERN Information Technology department, the CERN Translation service and the CERN central Archive.
