What's that sound? It could be anything at Library of Congress

WASHINGTON -- Close your eyes and just listen.

There's President Theodore Roosevelt denouncing corporate swindles. Robert Frost reading his poetry. Buffalo Bill Cody urging war with Spain over Cuba.

They are joined by 2.5 million other voices -- some famous, some not -- and sounds -- the huffing and puffing of a steam locomotive is one -- preserved at the Library of Congress.

On Monday, Librarian of Congress James Billington was announcing the first 50 sounds to be entered in a National Recording Registry. It seeks to ensure even greater protection for some of the most notable songs, speeches and other utterances.

The library is not the only government repository for sounds. The National Archives and Records Administration has tens of thousands of hours of Capitol Hill speeches, committee hearings and various other gatherings.

The library's, though, is the most dynamic and diverse collection. About 100,000 recordings, new and old, arrive in a typical year.

Moving collection

The collection has grown so large that the sounds, along with the library's enormous photo archive, will be moved to a new 41-acre complex in Culpeper, Va., about 70 miles southwest of Washington. Storage space is being built into the side of a small mountain. Construction should be complete in three years.

Anything stored in Culpeper will be accessible via computer at the library's Madison Building, on Capitol Hill a block from the Supreme Court.

In conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution, the library has embarked on a pilot project called "Save Our Sounds" that seeks to preserve recordings such as those made on wax cylinders by inventor Thomas Edison and others done on acetate discs in the early 20th century.

"We have every format you can imagine and every problem with every format," said Michael Taft, who helps run the program. "What we have to do is find a way of taking sound off of all of these different media and storing them as computer files in such a way that they will be readable and accessible not just today, but 100, 200 years from now."

Some of the recordings are so fragile that just playing them can be damaging. Also, technicians still are learning how best to "digitize" sounds. One obstacle is to find standards to ensure that sounds do not lose their original form when transferred to computer files.

"We don't clean up our recordings in the sense of getting all the pops and clicks and cracks out of them," Taft said. "These recordings are artifacts in themselves. You don't erase part of a painting on a Grecian urn because you didn't like it or it didn't fit what you thought was aesthetic."

Setting priorities on what to save first also is difficult.

"We have to make judgments on what's important," Taft said, "and a hundred years from now some researcher may find we failed to save the one thing he wanted."

Allan McConnell Jr., the library's top sound engineer, said it is tough to find technicians with the expertise to work with old sounds and new technology.

"There's plenty of computer whiz kids," McConnell said. "But they don't know the turntables -- they don't know how to do a wax cylinder or are even interested, for that matter. I may have six turntables sitting there, but if I can't keep them running, they're no good."

The Library of Congress got its first recording almost a century ago, a short speech by German Emperor Wilhelm II, the "Kaiser Bill" who launched World War I a decade later, in 1914.

'Fireside chats'

Theodore Roosevelt was the first president whose speeches were recorded. The library has samples of every president since, including dozens by Franklin Roosevelt, architect of the "fireside chats" to rally his countrymen's spirits during the Depression and World War II. The chats also reside at the library.

Federal law requires that any copyrighted sound must be stored at the library. Those that librarians judge will be in demand are kept easily available. A recent example: man-in-the-street interviews after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The library receives gifts of old collections and buys others. It has been collecting oral histories for years, including 12 hours of reminiscences from the last survivors of slavery.

More recently it has emphasized recollections of war veterans. About 4,500 have been recorded, 2,500 of them from World War II servicemen.

Phillip Russell told of what he saw on D-Day, June 6, 1944, when he was 23 and parachuted into northern France with the 101st Airborne Division:

"I came down in the middle of a herd of cows. They stood around me in a circle; they didn't know what it was. I tried to put my gun together, and then something came down beside me. It was one of my buddies."