Those who went through Yale’s Directed Studies program remember reading Ulysses with their eyes. But James Joyce wrote literature for the ears, something you might not fully appreciate until you’ve heard the author’s singsong lilt broguing its way through the wordplays and inventions of his Irish epic.

The Ulysses disk, signed by the author, is just one example of HSR’s extensive collection of spoken-word recordings—historic artifacts from a time when people did not take the ability to hear famous voices for granted. Preserving these recordings is a challenge: the fragile wax cylinders that captured the earliest sounds are the most vulnerable to decay, mold, and mildew, but even the shelf life of a standard vinyl LP is open to question. Richard Warren, the curator of HSR, says that chemists estimate it at perhaps a hundred years. To preserve the archive, “first you copy them,” he says, “then you think about cleaning and recopying them.” But there isn’t enough money or manpower to save everything; Warren speaks of “survival of the fittest.”