[78-L] NY ARSC Meeting - 10/23 - 92nd Street Y

[Dave Nolan Audio]

Association for Recorded Sound Collections

ARSC New York Chapter
October 2008 Meeting

Thursday, 10/23/08
at the 92nd Street Y
Buttenwieser Library (2nd Floor)
1395 Lexington Ave. (between 91st & 92nd Streets)
New York,  NY  10128
>From 7pm to 9pm – doors (and refreshments) at 6:30

Part 1:  Marcos Sueiro Bal

Choosing Your Favorite Children:  A Prioritizing Tool for AV Collections

Faced with limited budgets and cataclysmic predictions, the keepers of our audiovisual heritage find themselves in a tough situation. It appears ever more likely that at least some of our precious materials will vanish, either because of physical deterioration or --perhaps more likely-- hardware obsolescence. Columbia University's AVDb database tool, developed with funding from the Mellon Foundation, aims at helping with the ugly task of prioritizing for reformatting.

Marcos Sueiro Bal is an audio engineer who has worked in archives for over two decades --including the Center for Black Music Research, the Alan Lomax Archives, Columbia University, and Emory University. His latest project is mastering, without compression, the recordings of Polk Miller on Tompkins Square Records.

Part 2:  Mike Biel

Air Raid' and 'War Of the Worlds' Seventy Years On

It's been 70 years since a small percentage of the U.S. population actually believed something they heard on radio and took panicked flight from Martians who had taken over New Jersey and mid-town Manhattan.  We'll be safe up on 92nd Street as we listen to the possible effects that the CBS broadcast of Archibald MacLeish's "Air Raid" three days earlier might have had on the script, and find out what happened years later when the concept was updated in South America and Buffalo, New York.  We'll also trace what happened when one broadcast was issued on Columbia Records ("Air Raid") and almost forgotten, and the other one was studied and remembered but not heard for almost 20 years. 

Dr. Michael Biel recently retired from decades of teaching broadcasting to unsuspecting Kentuckians.  A native of New Jersey, he escaped to Kentucky 30 years ago on the assumption that Kentuckians will protect him from any invading Martians.  He does occasionally return to take refuge in his daughter's Brooklyn apartment, and this week is venturing out not only to ARSC but also to Newark to the Friends of Old Time Radio who still believe in Martians but feel safe in assuming Martians can't figure out the traffic patterns in New Jersey.  He is a lifelong collector of records and other oddities, has been a member of ARSC since 1971, is a past president of ARSC, chaired the program for five ARSC Conferences, and is a frequent presenter at the national ARSC Conferences.  His Ph.D. dissertation is on early broadcast recordings, and copies occasionally show up on Amazon and Nauck auctions.  He is looking forward to seeing a lot of old and new friends.