Notes for Notes

The University of North Texas (UNT) Music Library and its Digital Projects Unit are coordinating efforts to transfer archival recordings from the UNT College of Music to digital format to make them accessible online. The archives consist of concert and recital recordings of performances dating back to 1953 by UNT faculty, ensembles, and guest artists, as well as graduate and undergraduate candidates.

The UNT Music Library is also working to transfer its own archival print and sound collections to digital formats. In addition to its collection of rare print materials, such as the operas of Jean-Baptiste Lully and other eighteenth-century composers, the library also has plans to digitize its audio collections. Among the special collections to be transferred and made available online include John Gilliland's Pop Chronicles radio series, recordings and sheet music from band leaders Duke Ellington and Stan Kenton, radio broadcasts about NBC Symphony Orchestra conductor Arturo Toscanini entitled The Man Behind the Legend, and sheet music collections from radio stations WBAP in Fort Worth and WFAA in Dallas.

The current focus of the UNT Music Library is to continue digitizing rare print materials and the College of Music's recordings. Justice's next goal is focused on the Ellington collection, which includes 88 rare and never-released performances on reel-to-reel tape by Ellington in the U.S. and abroad.

The UNT College of Music is among the largest and most comprehensive music schools in the country and offers nearly 1,000 performances annually. Currently, its archival recordings are stored by the Music Library on formats of reel-to-reel tape, PCM F1 rotating digital audio tape, compact disc, and digital files. Once a digitized recording from the College of Music is delivered to the Digital Projects Unit, it is made accessible online to both on- and off-campus members of the UNT community. The files have metadata applied to them by student employees of the Music Library, largely informed by Library of Congress subject headings. Eventually, the recordings will be linked to digitized programs of each performance, which are also being scanned by the Digital Projects Unit.

The University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) Miller Nichols Library has received a $502,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The grant will help UMKC maintain and share one of the library's richest radio collections in its Marr Sound Archives. While many of history's radio and music recordings have long disappeared, UMKC's Marr Sound Archives preserves these historic sounds for future generations. The Mellon grant will support a cataloging project for the J. David Goldin Collection, which represents a portion of the more than 290,000 unique items that comprise the Marr Sound Archives.

J. David Goldin, a leading authority on historic radio programs, contributed nearly 10,000 items to the Marr Sound Archives. The Goldin Collection consists of 16-inch instantaneous cut acetate discs and pressed recordings—dating from 1935 to 1950—each thirty minutes in length and produced for broadcast. These delicate recordings are not preserved in any other form or format. The cataloging project will make the contents of these rare, original sound recordings available for the first time to academic researchers worldwide through online catalog access. The project began on 1 January 2008, and is expected to continue through 31 December 2010.

Syracuse University (SU) Library's Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive has received a major gift from the family of the late Morton J. "Morty" Savada—the complete inventory of his Manhattan record store, Records Revisited, including more than 200,000 78-rpm records, along with a related print collection of catalogs, discographies, and other materials. With the addition of the Savada Collection, Belfer's holdings now total more than 400,000 78-rpm recordings—second in size only to the collections of the Library of Congress.

The Savada Collection, valued at just over $1 million, is a treasure trove of popular music, including unique and hard-to-find genres. It is strongest in big band and jazz, but also represents a wide variety of other musical genres, including country, blues, gospel, polka, folk, Broadway, Hawaiian, and Latin. It...