[78-L] online archive, was: jewish columbia records

[Sherry Mayrent]

At 09:50 PM 1/1/2009, Joel Bresler wrote:
>Hi, Sherry, I'd be interested in knowing more about the planned
>archive...please answer on-list if of interest to all, else off-list.
>
>Thanks!
>
>Joel
>

Hi, Joel.  I'd been sort of saving up the news till we were further 
along, but since the cat is out of the bag, as it were....

Basically, it's been my dream since I first got involved in the 
klezmer world to make access to the old recordings available to 
everyone.  These records are our teachers, since in the Yiddish world 
we don't have an unbroken line of practitioners, at least not to the 
extent that we might need, and when I was coming up in the ranks, you 
could only get copies of copies of 78s if you knew someone who was 
willing to share with you.  With the advent of the internet, I've 
recently been able to amass what Henry Sapoznik (founder and 
executive director of KlezKamp) has called the largest and most 
comprehensive private collection of Yiddish recordings around, and 
I'm basically lending them to Living Traditions to be digitalized and 
made available through a searchable online archive.  The 
digitalization is being done by Chris King, who many folks on the 
list may know from his reissues in a wide variety of fields, and the 
transfers are outstanding in their intelligibility, even when there 
is a fair amount of surface noise to cope with.  We currently have 
over 1000 sides transferred and are working on designing the 
searchable database, which we want to be the most useful to the most 
users, so we're taking our time and hoping to get it right.  If all 
goes well, we aim to have the first few hundred recordings available 
by the end of this year.

One thing that's really exciting about this project, to me at least, 
is that with the advent of the internet -- and not just eBay, but 
also access to paper auctions I might never have heard about -- I've 
gotten records from dealers all over the world.  In the days when 
collecting meant travelling around to garage sales and flea markets, 
I would never have had access to such venues in Israel, South America 
and Europe.  As a result of international accessibility, I've amassed 
fairly sizeable sub-collections of material from all of those venues, 
including the former Soviet Union.

Anyway, thanks for your interest.  I'll keep the list informed of our progress.

-- Sherry

Sherry Mayrent
Associate Director, KlezKamp
www.klezkamp.org