ILKAR – Integrated solutions for the preservation, archiving and conservation of endangered magnetic tapes and cylinders

The music archive at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin owns a unique collection of traditional music from regions all around the world. The collection contains more than 30,000 wax cylinder records and almost 10,000 original field recordings on a variety of analogue and digital recording media (magnetic audio tapes, DAT, VHS, etc.). The museum’s wax cylinder record collection was added to the UNESCO “Memory of the World” list in 1999 for the outstanding importance of its historical audio material.
To safeguard this and other comparable collections for the long term, the KUR project developed innovative methods to identify, slow down and even prevent material-related aging processes in such media. The new findings on the conservation and preservation of cylinders and tape recordings were optimized in scientific archives for later application in order to enhance the efficiency of conventional preservation measures.
In addition to workshops and publications, the Ethnological Museum also held an exhibition to present the conservation process to the public.

Project administrator:
Ethnological Museum, Berlin State Museums, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz

Cooperative partners:
Rathgen Research Laboratory, Berlin State Museums, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz
Technische Universität, Munich
Phonogram Archive at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna
Centre de Recherche sur la Conservation des Collections CRCC, Paris
Rochester Institute of Technology, New York