At the start of the project, only the tapes of the pieces “The Kiss of Judas” and “Timothy” that had been edited in KOSTIMA were recorded. Several technical hurdles had to be overcome. The Telefunken tape recorders available required maintenance that only a few repair shops are still able to carry out. Nowadays, the knowledge required to repair tape recorders is rarely passed on, and trained radio electronics technicians have generally long since passed retirement age. Fortunately, the company Hilpert Tonstudiotechnik from Hamburg agreed to service the equipment. In the meantime, we transferred to ASC4000 machines, which were also in need of maintenance, but fortunately this was carried out on site in Hanover.
The digital recording of all audio tapes was completed at the end of February 2026. Student assistants recorded a total of 670 tapes. At the same time, the covers and inserts of the tapes as well as the media units themselves were photographed on a reproduction table. All raw data was converted to MP3 format for provision in the fylr database and the photographs were combined into PDF files. The digitized files will soon be available at https://kostima.gbv.de.
