In an old cabinet near the collection room, in a lab that used to be where most entomology classes were taught, reside several sets of long-forgotten 35 mm slides and cassettes.
I mostly ignored them since coming to Penn State, as they weren’t part of the Frost or my lab’s legacy. However, it’s clear now that they’ve been abandoned and are ripe for exploration and repurposing. I was intrigued by the names on the boxes—Carpenter, Wilson, Gilbert, Locke, Metcalf …
These are GIANTS of entomology! With a bit of digging, I figured out that we had in our possession almost two complete sets of educational materials, developed by the Entomological Society of America and Brigham Young University. The Introductory Entomology Instructional Kit was published in 1973 and cost $300 (about $1,700 in today’s money). I am dying to listen to these cassettes while working my way through the slideshows. They’re clearly outdated, but to hear the voices of these famous entomologists and to get a sense of state of entomology around the time I was born … Well, it would be amazing.
We flirted with the idea of transferring these materials to digital formats—scan the slides, transfer cassette audio to mp3, and maybe put them on YouTube if we could get permission—but that would be a lot of work, and I fear for the state of these cassettes. I haven’t tested one yet (I don’t even have a tape player anymore!), but my understanding is that magnetic tape is not archival. The life span can be as short as 10–20 years, even under ideal environmental conditions. I suspect these cassettes were played extensively in the years following 1973, and the cabinet they’ve been stored in has weathered many unfortunate events (e.g., extreme humidity from repeated flooding). If I try to play one will it fall apart?
We also thought about incorporating the slides into our exhibits somehow, probably as a back-lit, stand alone window treatment:
Of course we’d want to do this in a way that protects these slides from degradation, and we’re still researching this. I wonder if ESA and BYU have the original recordings and photos in their archives. Do any of you readers have these kits?
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