Notes For Notes

The Boston College Libraries have been awarded a $30,775 grant to digitally reformat a selection of unique audio collections in the John J. Burns Library's Irish Music Archives. The grant is one of sixteen awarded nationally through the second round of the Recordings at Risk program, administered by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Entitled Sounds of Mid-20th Century Irish America: Preserving Historic Music Field Recordings for Research Access, the project focuses on two internationally known collections supporting the study of Irish traditional music. This work will involve experts from across the Boston College Libraries, including digital library and preservation specialists and archivists, exemplifying core library values to preserve and make accessible heritage and research collections for the long term.

The two archival collections, the James W. Smith Irish Music Recordings and the Joseph A. Lamont Irish Music Recordings, include open-reel tapes of unpublished music. The 1950s–60s music performances feature some of Boston and New York's most prominent Irish musicians at the time, and the informal nature and setting of the recordings—noncommercial "jam sessions" in public and private spaces—capture uniquely the time and spirit of this evolving musical genre. The material will be of high value to musicologists, performers of Irish and folk music, and scholars of Irish American history, cultural anthropology, and folkways of immigrant communities.

The highly competitive bidding process included an "independent, full scholarly and technical review that assessed scholarly value, cost effectiveness and technical competence," and prioritized the long-term preservation of content. The Sounds of Mid-20th Century Irish America project represents a classic case of high-value research content inaccessible without digitization and preservation.

The project is scheduled for completion in late 2018. All of the digitized recordings will be accessible to researchers and the public in the Burns Library; a full account of what is on the tapes will be available online from the libraries' Web site, along with a selection of music. For more information, please contact Irish Music Librarian Elizabeth Sweeney at elizabeth.sweeney@bc.edu.

Elizabeth Sweeney
Boston College

The Anne Potter Wilson Music Library at the Blair School of Music, Vanderbilt University, recently acquired an opera autograph collection and several other related items at the Christie's Metropolitan Opera Guild Auction in July 2017. The opera autograph collection includes forty-two items (letters, photographs, and ephemera) chiefly from 1826–1960, with a focus on the correspondence of Enrico Caruso. The Wilson Music Library also acquired a signed autograph musical quotation of Massenet's Hérodiade, a gold and diamond brooch featuring singer Risë Stevens in her role as Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier, a silver cigarette case embossed with images of Enrico Caruso and Heinrich Conrad, and a two-page autograph letter from Alban Berg to Rudolf Kastner dated 1927. These new acquisitions complement the Francis Robinson Collection of Theatre, Music, and Dance that was given to Vanderbilt University in 1980. Funding for these items was provided by Richard Miller, president of the Metropolitan Opera Guild and a managing partner of Morris and McVeigh.

Holling Smith-Borne
Vanderbilt University

The Conservatory Library at Oberlin College recently acquired the Ed Berger Photographic Collection, an expansive collection of over 100,000 jazz photographs taken by Berger between the 1960s and 2016. Over the course of nearly five decades, he documented the entire spectrum of jazz, capturing candid moments and formal portraits of hundreds of jazz greats. A particular strength is the collection's representation of Benny Carter, a saxophonist and arranger who Berger shared a close friendship with as biographer and road manager for many decades.

Berger photographed events including jazz rehearsals and concerts, memorials and tributes, festivals, museum openings and gallery exhibitions, and a variety of lectures and educational events. The photographs were taken onstage, in offices and classrooms, and at homes, representing an extensive range of venues associated with a life in jazz. Known for his humility, modesty, and lack of interest in being in the spotlight, Berger was able to use his unassuming approach to create insightful candid photographs of his many subjects...