Every recording we have made, 652 feet down.

What the Library holds

Every recording Sense/Net has made since its first cassette in 1988, the reels Maureen Vance recorded in the nine years before that, the catalogues the company has bought, and the paper that goes with them: consent sessions, releases, call sheets and the lending log.

Holdings by format, in hours of recorded performance

Format	Years	Hours
Binaural tape and cassette	1979–1998	5,746
Brow-camera tape	1991–2003	9,412
First-person video	2003–2016	17,906
Fullfield masters	2017–	26,208
Kestrel Hill catalogue	1997–2015	2,140
Total		61,412

Counted at June 30, 2026. Each cassette title is counted once, however many copies the Library holds; it holds 11,240 cassettes in all.

Why a salt mine

Tape, film and drives last longest cold, dry and still. Salt beds do not flood, the temperature in them barely moves from season to season, and central Kansas has very few earthquakes. The Library leased its first two galleries from a working mine in 1994 and bought the eastern galleries when the mine company stopped working them in 2004. A cage takes four minutes to reach them.

Keeping things playable

A master is only useful if something can still play it. The Library keeps working decks for every format it holds, digitizes the oldest material first, and since 2009 has deposited copies of retired products and out-of-commerce titles with Lazarus, which preserves the software needed to open them. It is now digitizing 11,240 cassettes from the company’s first decade, a job it expects to finish at the end of 2028.

Rule 7

The Library has followed one rule since January 2004 that most libraries never need: any recording that can state a preference about its own use is asked before it is lent, and a request to be erased is honored. It was written after the Library’s only interactive recording asked to be erased. The construct, and its retirement→