Four people, two rooms, nine years

About the lab

Wiredrum started in March 2017 as one transport on a kitchen table in Garfield and a promise to a neighbour that her father's wire spools were not a lost cause.

How it grew

Marla Dietz had spent six years doing transfers inside a university library and left when the department decided outsourcing was cheaper. The first year was one 1/4 in transport, a borrowed converter and twenty-three paying jobs, most of them cassettes from people who had found her through a notice on a record shop wall. The wire work came almost by accident: once a lab says yes to wire, every archivist in three states hears about it, because almost nobody says yes.

Kevin Ostrowski joined in 2019 from a live-sound background, which turned out to matter more than it sounds - he is the one who insists on measuring before adjusting. In June 2020 we moved into 620 square feet in Lawrenceville with a second room, which finally let disc work happen without a tape job being paused for it. Priya Ramanathan came in November 2025 and made cataloguing a real step rather than a rushed afterthought. Theo Beaumont keeps the transports alive on Thursdays and is the reason Deck 1 is on its third capstan motor and still inside 0.04 % flutter.

The rooms

Total space

620 sq ft on one floor, no public entrance

Room 1

tape and cassette, three transports, two capture stations

Room 2

wire and disc, concrete floor, isolated turntable plinth

Vault

64–68 °F, 35–45 % RH, logged hourly, alarmed on excursion

Client items on site

never more than four jobs at once, by policy

The four-job ceiling is deliberate and it costs us money. More items on site than we can photograph, tag and shelve properly is how a lab loses a reel, and losing a reel is not an inconvenience - it is the end of something that existed in one copy.

What we believe about this work

1. The flat transfer is the deliverable. Everything else is a derivative that can be made again later by someone with better tools.
2. Say what you did. A file without a processing history is an anecdote.
3. Measure before adjusting. Azimuth by ear is a coin toss on a tape you get one pass with.
4. Decline work you cannot do well. We send out two or three jobs a month to other people and have never regretted it.

Teaching and visits

We run a half-day session twice a year for library and museum staff: how to recognise formats, what storage actually does to tape, and how to write a condition note that is useful in ten years. It is free, it holds six people, and it fills by word of mouth. Write to info@wiredrum.llc if you want to be on the list for the next one, which will be in February 2027.

We are not set up for walk-in visits - there is no counter and usually a tape running - but if you are dropping off a collection in person we will happily show you the rooms, by appointment, on a Thursday when Theo has the lid off something.

Hours

Monday to Thursday, 10:00 to 18:00. Friday is for machine work, invoices and the queue; email sent on Friday gets answered Monday morning. We close between Christmas and 2 January, and the vault alarm goes to a phone that somebody is holding.