Join archivist and exhibition co-curator Collin Vandewalle for a talk about Dictabelts, a now-obsolete analog audio recording format popular in the mid-20th century. In use from 1947 through the 1970s, Dictabelts are colorful, thin, imprinted plastic cylinders that slide over the drum of a Dictagram machine and have both limited recording capacity and finite playback ability.

The Darling Papers in Special Collections and Archives at the University of Iowa Libraries contain a large quantity of Dictabelts with recordings by Jay N. “Ding” Darling (1876–1962), a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for The Des Moines Register and one of the nation’s most influential figures in the American conservation movement. Thousands of Dictabelts with recordings of Darling’s voice were digitized, then inadvertently hidden in back storage for two decades. Vandewalle, who has worked closely with this collection, will give a unique look into how to care for obsolete media formats like Dictabelts, how they can be used for research and educational purposes, and the takeaways of using Dictabelts and other obsolete media formats for exhibition.

This virtual event is part of programming for the current UI Main Library Gallery exhibition, It’s Been Wonderful Knowing You: Wildlife Conservation and Advocacy Through the Lens of Jay N. “Ding” Darling.