What does radio...look like?
Sometimes, I might say: well, whatever you are looking at the moment you are listening (especially when music creates a soundtrack for something like the leaves blowing outside your window or the river flowing by). Or perhaps I might say it looks like the images - often abstract - that we create in our mind to follow the shape of the sound.
On the more prosaic side of things, you could say that radio looks like a person listening - deep in thought or chatting with someone in the backseat of the car. Though for those of us working here, we might think first a person in a studio, talking into a microphone - or even a few people in animated discussion, as we often see down the hall with our colleagues on Connections.
But today, I am thinking about the different way a radio looks - or at least, visualizing a radio show's worth of music. Normally, a bit like this:
As much as I love hugging a stack of recordings and pawing through the liner notes, it couldn't go on.
The CDs get scratched, oxidized, and generally fall apart. Some albums only come out as files. And most frightening (and surprising to many!) is that the programmable CD players that we use every day are no longer being manufactured. Our last few machines are being held together with love and duct tape by our faithful engineers.
I am happy to say that we now have more than 85% of our CDs digitized, as files instead of on physical discs (thank you to my pedantic friends who point out that CDs are already digital). And with a recent additional hookup between our library catalog and our radio playback system, we can play so much of our library from files.
So a radio show (from just this week) in terms of CDs looks like this:
Just. one. CD. It felt surreal to only carry so little "stuff" into the studio. The rest of the music looks like what you see at the top of this post. And it (almost!) all works.
There's still more work to be done, but thanks to the help of many people, we have made so much progress over just a few years, and it is now really a functioning system (and in case you are wondering: NO, I'm NOT getting rid of the CDs, at least not for a long time. They're still here as long as I can keep them and they still are useful as a backup and for those liner notes and more.)
I'll end with just a quick shout out to some of the people who have made this all possible: mid-day host Steve Johnson as our library assistant, our fabulous IT and engineering teams (Greg, and Ben, and Kristie, Dave, and Tiffany), radio management (Ruth and Jeanne), our library technicians: previously, Sarah Chasey (now at the Sibley Library!) and Tucker Johnson, the many interns who have been roped into this project - especially recent library school graduate Cole Cassano, who made such a difference in moving this project forward last summer, and the generous donor who funded the contract library technician position (thank you thank you!) along with the ongoing support of our listeners for all of this work.
Let's keep the music playing and sounding good, no matter how it looks.
