The ‘Race Against Time’ to Save Music Legends’ Decaying Tapes; The New York Times, December 1, 2025

 

Ben Sisario

Visuals by Peter Fisher

, The New York Times; The ‘Race Against Time’ to Save Music Legends’ Decaying Tapes

"IRON MOUNTAIN IS a $25 billion company that specializes in “information management.” With more than 1,200 facilities around the world — including a 315-acre underground complex in a former limestone mine in western Pennsylvania — it offers secure storage for corporate records, as well as for media assets from Hollywood studios, record companies and prestige clients like the Grammys and the Prince estate. Within its vaults lie seemingly endless shelves of film, videotape and audio reels...

Pribble’s colleagues at Iron Mountain say their biggest challenge has been finding a way to scale his time-consuming work of restoring tape. Pribble has a solution for that, too: a new set of machines that would automate his processes, allowing him to establish satellite workshops around the world.

“They’ve always been saying they can’t clone Kelly,” he said. “This is kind of cloning me."

Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure a ‘Pirate Bay of Science’ Never Goes Down; Vice, December 2, 2019

Matthew Gault, Vice;

Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure a ‘Pirate Bay of Science’ Never Goes Down

"...[O]ver the last few years, two sites—Library Genesis and Sci-Hub—have become high-profile, widely used resources for pirating scientific papers.

The problem is that these sites have had a lot of difficulty actually staying online. They have faced both legal challenges and logistical hosting problems that has knocked them offline for long periods of time. But a new project by data hoarders and freedom of information activists hopes to bring some stability to one of the two “Pirate Bays of Science...

“It's the largest free library in the world, servicing tens of thousands of scientists and medical professionals around the world who live in developing countries that can't afford to buy books and scientific journals. There's almost nothing else like this on Earth. They're using torrents to fulfill World Health Organization and U.N. charters. And it's not just one site index—it's a network of mirrored sites, where a new one pops up every time another gets taken down,” user shrine said on Reddit."