Indiana University will launch its highly anticipated new website, Orson Welles on the Air: Radio Recordings and Scripts, 1938-1946, on Thursday evening, October 26, at https://orsonwelles.indiana.edu
“These materials are treasures of great interest to scholars, students and the general public,” said Erika Dowell, associate director and curator of modern books and magazines at the Lilly Library. “There are more than 20,000 items held at the Lilly Library that pertain to Welles’ activities on stage, in radio and on film, as well as his personal and political life.”
To celebrate the launch, Indiana University will offer a special program on Welles’ radio innovations at the Bloomington campus on Thursday. Patrick Feaster of the university’s Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative will speak at 5:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. in the Moving Image Archive Screening Room on the ground floor of the Herman B. Wells Library.
A three-time Grammy nominee and co-founder of the First Sounds Initiative, Feaster had taken the worn and damaged lacquer discs to Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, Massachusetts. Experts there can preserve audio from grooved media using a touchless optical-scan technology, which retrieves sound without damaging the physical object.
“The process was developed experimentally by the Library of Congress and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, among other places, but the NEDCC is the first place to make it work as a commercial service,” Feaster said. “These are recordings that, just a few years ago, would’ve been beyond recovery.”
He added, “These are glass discs with a thin veneer of lacquer coating, which are extremely fragile. They’re broken, but the grooves could still be lined up.”
The Lilly’s copy of The War of the Worlds, as well as the other broadcasts, are Welles’ personal copies, Feaster said.
“These are what Welles would’ve listened to if he’d wanted to go back and hear the production,” he said. “Even before the transfer and new preservation, the Lilly’s copy of ‘War of the Worlds’ was better-sounding than any of the commercial copies. It has better audio, and I am sure that virtually no one has heard it.”
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