Preservation of old recording masters

[Swing Band Heaven]

The topic of preservation of master copies of recordings seems to crop up every now and again so when I saw this article I thought it might be of interest. It muses on the sad fact that so much has been lost and I am not sure if much (if anything has improved since 1997 when the article was written. Anyway I thought it might be of some interest here, even if it does make for depressing reading!

labels Strive to Rectify Past Archival Problems

[Lenoirstreetguy]

My suspicion is that it's probably worse. Alas. The major archives of the commercial copies are are certainly feeling the pinch. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation here in Toronto last year exiled the entire 78rpm collection: it dated from 1934 to the end of the 78 rpm period. Thousands and thousands of records all indexed several ways by means of a card file. If a local collector hadn't saved most of the collection it would now be landfill.

Jim

[Swing Band Heaven]

It is shocking at how old recordings are treated...to think they have been sat there safely for all those years and then that happens! A place where I used to work had the same attitude to old archive documents, there was a huge archive of architectural drawings the earliest were from the 1870's...beautiful hand drawings of proposed buildings which were submitted to the local council for approval..some important buildings designed by people such as Edwin Lutyens. They had sat in the council archive for over 100 years and then when the offices re-located they were all put in a skip for shredding. I managed to retrieve them and got the county archivist involved and they now sit (safely for the time being at least)in the county collection. I am comforted that they took time and money to properly catelogue the collection...which hopefully means they are unlikely to bin them in the near future.

[phonogfp]

And this, my friends, is why the salvation of antique talking machines, records, and related items lies with private collectors - not museums nor corporate collections. Only collectors have their own time and money invested in these artifacts, and only collectors will be obsessive/compulsive enough to learn every detail about their artifacts and to guard them zealously.

This is not to suggest that there are no fine museums that perform top quality restoration and preservation. They're out there, but they are too few, and lack the concentrated focus of the collectors, who number in the thousands. The lion's share of preservation for talking machines and records will be performed by collectors.

George P.