Recorded sound

They wondered where I was in the Uni Library this morning  – I was off looking at old magazines in the National Library of Scotland!

High Fidelity

I did find a couple of book reviews and an advert, which is what I was looking for. But I was also drawn to other adverts for long-playing records, tape recorders and plastic recorders! Here we are today, with our phones, mics, streaming services and laptops, whilst a wooden recorder is much more eco-friendly, not to mention authentic. But in post-war Britain, all this shiny new stuff was the last word in modernity! 

As for a record that held four times as much music as a 78? Who wouldn’t want such an innovation?! 

Oh, and I spotted another ‘innovation’: folk songs with guitar chords. The times they certainly were a-changing. (And this was a decade before Bob Dylan’s song!)

Anyway, I filled in a couple of gaps in my knowledge by ploughing through eight years‘ worth of bound, unindexed magazines (we forget how amazing digitised journals are!), and answered another question with a microfilmed reel (urgh, old technology!) of another journal.  To think that microfilms were comparatively modern when I was a postgrad the first time round.  Today, I used a shiny new microfilm reader – very techie – but it’s still a linear way of storing data. Luckily, I found what I was looking for towards the end of the first reel.

And had a thoroughly modern iced latte before heading back to the Uni Library!