Notes for Notes

The University of Pittsburgh Library System (ULS) has received a 2020 Preservation Implementation Grant from the GRAMMY Museum Grant Program. This grant will support a new digitization project, led by James P. Cassaro, Head of the Theodore M. Finney Music Library. With the $11,461 award, the ULS will digitize and preserve 210 hours of performances from its Emerging Masters Collection, which documents the University of Pittsburgh Concert Series from 1954 to 1989. The endangered recordings are currently housed on 395 open reel audio tapes. Many of the Emerging Masters recordings have never been commercially released, such as Jean-Claude Risset's innovative Songes for electronic tape. Others represent formative efforts by composers and performers who went on to have major musical careers, like Morton Subotnick's earliest electronic music works. The collection also includes performances and premieres of works by jazz composers/performers Geri Allen and Nathan Davis, contemporary art music for computers and electronics by Guy Klucevsek and Morton Subotnick, and instrumental music by David Stock and Reza Vali. These unique tapes document early composition techniques and future artistic promise on an international scale. Preserving these valuable and endangered materials will enable public access to historical American music that is not otherwise available. After transfer to digital files, the recordings will be openly available to researchers worldwide on the ULS Digital Collections Web site (https://digital.library.pitt.edu/).

James P. Cassaro

University of Pittsburgh

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The Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University has launched a streaming site to provide access to audio and video recordings of Peabody performances, campus events, and other unique collections.

Since going online in fall 2019, Peabody's streaming collections have grown to more than five hundred online resources, the vast majority of which are of recent concerts and degree recitals at the Peabody Con- servatory. Recordings are prepared by audio engineers and video editors and then submitted to the Arthur Friedheim Library Archives for preservation in Preservica and streaming access hosted by AVP's Aviary.

The growth of video production services at Peabody is a natural extension of its audio recording program, which has captured all major campus events since the 1960s. In recent years, Peabody has installed video cameras in all five concert halls and equipped staff to produce recordings and a select number of live-streamed events. Thanks to some partially automated captures, recordings are typically made available for streaming to the campus community within about three weeks of the event.

The streaming service has been well received by the Peabody community, especially after the campus closed in spring 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic. Students were able to access video recordings of their recitals from home, and the Institute drew on some archived concert videos to hold online watch parties for the public. The Arthur Friedheim Library has also hosted digital resources to serve online classes. Piano accompanists for the Peabody Preparatory community music school submitted homemade audio recordings that other musicians could play along to from home.

When the pandemic pushed most performing arts activities online, Peabody began the ArtReach initiative to collect and share self-produced videos of music and dance performances by students, faculty, and alumni in response to the crisis. Many of the videos of living-room performances that the Peabody community shared on social media have been submitted to the ArtReach archival collection for preservation and ongoing access. Several of these have already been added to the ArtReach streaming collection.

Library workers involved in preparing resources and configuring new systems are pleased to see the fruits of a multi-year expansion of digital preservation activities. In less than one year, there have been more than fifteen thousand plays of online media files from the library's streaming collections. The growth in digital preservation services has also boosted the library's capacity to manage digital content and prepare for other reformatting projects, such as an audiocassette collection of oral histories with local African American musicians that is being digitized.

Peabody's streaming collections are online at https://streaming.peabody.jhu.edu. Some recordings of public-domain works are...