Notes For Notes

The Music & Media Center of Howard-Tilton Memorial Library at Tulane University is pleased to announce the launch this past fall of the New Orleans Independent Music Digital Collection. This new collection makes available for the first time full streaming audio from selected tracks of independently released albums by New Orleans artists. With the incorporation of a rich set of linked data through which users can explore genres, bands, and individual artistic output, this collection seeks to expose the deeply interconnected musical culture of New Orleans. Users of the digital collection can listen to selected tracks, view album cover art, link to band Web sites, and explore the complex relationships and collaborations across the local indie music landscape. New tracks are continually being added to the collection and, as it grows, the New Orleans Independent Music Digital Collection will become an entry-level research platform for anyone studying local musical culture. All tracks included in the collection are digitized from albums already owned by Howard-Tilton Memorial Library and with the permission of rights holders. This and many other exciting collections may be found at http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu.

Lisa Hooper
Tulane University

In the summer of 2015, our staff at the Music Materials Center of the James White Library, Andrews University, embarked on an extensive project to ensure our locally assigned call-number list for sound recordings matched the online catalog and the physical shelves. Still known as the “Blackbook” (although it migrated to computer sometime in the 1980s), the call-number list was started by Elaine Waller during the 1970s. Considering how long this shelflist has been in existence and the dozens of student workers who have worked on it over the years, we were happy to discover in the course of our project that the Blackbook was mostly accurate. This speaks to the dedication and quality of the Music Materials Center’s student workers through the decades.

During the course of the project, we also found several LPs in our collection that had not been cataloged, fixed misshelved sections and oddly labeled items, reclassified several recordings, and generally aligned the shelflist and the online catalog. We originally imagined this would be a quick project for late spring, but instead finished in late July, just in time for students to use a better-organized sound collection at the start of a new school year.

Marianne Kordas
Andrews University

The Historical Music Recordings Collection (HMRC) of the Fine Arts Library, University of Texas at Austin, recently added a massive infusion of pristine and rare punk vinyl in the form of 700 LPs and 400 singles (45s) from a collection amassed by the late Justin Gibran (Freud) Reia. Freud was an avid music collector and musician. His mother, Flora Salyers, and wife, Tamara Schatz, generously donated his collection, which fills a significant genre gap the HMRC’s overall corpus. “The collection is great, just absolutely great,” says Benjamin Houtman, outgoing HMRC graduate research assistant. “Very, very authentic, widely varied—you can tell he loved this stuff. I’ve just barely scratched the surface but I’ve already seen Sham69, Flipper, the Jim Carroll Band, Iggy, Stiv Bators, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Blondie, The Clash, Black Flag—all legends—along with tons of completely obscure stuff. . . . I wish my record collection was one-tenth as good as this. I’m envious of the GRA who really gets to dig into this collection. I hope they appreciate it. Every record I’ve looked at appears to be in good shape too. Wow.”

David Hunter
University of Texas at Austin

The William Madison Randall Library and the University of North Carolina Wilmington Music Department received an inhouse grant from The Friends of UNCW, a group that provides funding for a variety of projects throughout the university. In consideration of the summer of 2014 premiere of Opera Wilmington, the city’s first live opera company, and increased interest in opera, the library sought funding to update current opera holdings, specifically a video collection in VHS format...