Not knowing their URL (and having forgotten what the C stood for), I simply googled "association of recorded sound." That sent me to the homepage of the ASRC--a nonprofit organization whose audio preservation work and educational efforts in the area of copyright law (especially as it applies to sound recordings) have earned them honor among organizations with an interest in building and maintenance of recorded sound collections. Learn more about them here.
And keep listening.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Database Fun
A "citation pearl growing" approach was used in a search for information on whaling activities by Japan. JSTOR was the database, and the search commenced with the keyword "whaling." Facing 2100 hits, "japan" was added, and then "scientific." This cut the field down to the hundreds. One article on tracing genetic structures of whale products suggested the term "population decline," the addition of which produced a manageable 23 hits, the first few of which are shown above.
Above, you'll see an example of a the results of a "successive fraction" search using WorldCat.
In this case, I am looking for recordings of Choctaw Indian songs, sung in Choctaw; I began by specifying the keyword "Choctaw" and "sound recording" as the type of material. This produced 150 hits. I then limited those results to non-juvenile audience, and this pared the field down to 88. I then used WorldCat's "Limit" button to limit by subject; from the list generated by the database, I was given the results shown above.
Dialog was used to demonstrate a building block search. This, after all, seems to be what it was built for. The search query used was
Example 1. Screen shot of building block search in DIALOG
The first screen shot, above, shows the first and second building blocks for the search of DIALOG and their combination. The first, photograph? and collection?, returned thousands of hits for the individual words, but 673 for the pair--a helpful start. The second block, digit? and preserv? again returned thousands for the individual words, but 426 for the pair. Combining the two returned an entirely manageable 10 hits, shown in example 2, below--and several of these applied to the matter at hand, the digitization and preservation of photographic collections.
Example 2. Final Hits page from DIALOG.
The final search, a browsing search in Books in Print, began with KW: photography" and "KS: history" returning 1953 hits. Browsing the first 10 revealed one that pointed me in the direction I wanted to go: Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums has, as one of its Bowker subjects "Photography in Historiography."
Example 5. Initial browsing search of BIP.Following the trail of this subject gets me the 17 hits on the page headed with the selections shown in example 6.
Example 6. Hits from browsing search in BIP.
The LibraryThing Thing...thing
*el(1) 24x16(1) audio(1) digital(1) non-fiction(2) paperback(1) pl/tv(1) recordings(1) reference(1)
http://www.librarything.com/work/1150337
Hmmm, not exactly the cumulonimbus I was hoping for, but respectiable enough, and...Oh, hello, there! I was just pretending that you interrupted me while I was looking over a tag cloud for John Watkinson's An Introduction to Digital Audio. It's not really any good for studying outmoded technologies--not for months, yet--but it is a valuable resource for those who might be contemplating an audio preservation effort, since digital, in one form or another, is going to be with us for a while.
Keep listening.
http://www.librarything.com/work/1150337
Hmmm, not exactly the cumulonimbus I was hoping for, but respectiable enough, and...Oh, hello, there! I was just pretending that you interrupted me while I was looking over a tag cloud for John Watkinson's An Introduction to Digital Audio. It's not really any good for studying outmoded technologies--not for months, yet--but it is a valuable resource for those who might be contemplating an audio preservation effort, since digital, in one form or another, is going to be with us for a while.
Keep listening.
The Definition of Venerable
Today we feature Smithsonian Institution's nonprofit record label, Smithsonian Folkways. SF's mission of "supporting cultural diversity and increased understanding among peoples through the documentation, preservation, and dissemination of sound" began with the efforts of Moses Asch and Marion Distler to document the world's cultures through the sounds--music, spoken word, noises, calls, and general racket, all of which Asch adored. This was the beginning of what we now know as "world music" (About Folkways: Smithsonian Folkways--Our Mission and History,
World music is now an important part of virtually every library's collection of recorded sound. And Smithsonian Folkways has grown beyond anything Asch and Distler could have envisioned when they started the record label in 1948. Significantly, the Smithsonian Institute agreed in 1986 to keep virtually all of the label's 2000+ titles perpetually in print; and since then, over 300 new recordings have been issued.
SF is a partner with Smithsonian Global Sound in creating a worldwide network of music and sound archives. An RSS feed from SGS's site will help keep us abreast of what's going on with them, who is featured, and what is available from the archives.
Keep listening.
World music is now an important part of virtually every library's collection of recorded sound. And Smithsonian Folkways has grown beyond anything Asch and Distler could have envisioned when they started the record label in 1948. Significantly, the Smithsonian Institute agreed in 1986 to keep virtually all of the label's 2000+ titles perpetually in print; and since then, over 300 new recordings have been issued.
SF is a partner with Smithsonian Global Sound in creating a worldwide network of music and sound archives. An RSS feed from SGS's site will help keep us abreast of what's going on with them, who is featured, and what is available from the archives.
Keep listening.
The Golden Days of Podcasting
Today we feature a podcast from the golden days of...well, not exactly the golden days--more like the waning days of radio. In mid-1958, comedian and advertising genius Stan Freberg--who pioneered the funny commercial, among other things--decided to try to give radio a new lease on life. Televisions had, for a number of years, been infiltrating middle-class households, but Freberg was betting that the American public would grow weary of putting their imaginations on hold for a half-hour at a time, and that radio was bound to make a comeback once they did.
He was wrong. He could not get a consistent sponsor for the show, and so a show that would have been hugely popular five or ten years earlier dried up after about 15 episodes. Paste the following link in your browser, and a nice young man will talk to you for a minute, and then the cast will appear to be over. Just grab the little progress slider and carefully pull it back to as close to 00:00 as you can (carefully, we said!). Then you'll get about 30 minutes of a great idea that showed up a little late.
http://www.mediafly.com/Podcasts/Episodes/The_Stan_Freberg_Show_Musical_Sheep_7141957
And thanks to the good people at www.mediafly.com for helping me find it in the first place.
He was wrong. He could not get a consistent sponsor for the show, and so a show that would have been hugely popular five or ten years earlier dried up after about 15 episodes. Paste the following link in your browser, and a nice young man will talk to you for a minute, and then the cast will appear to be over. Just grab the little progress slider and carefully pull it back to as close to 00:00 as you can (carefully, we said!). Then you'll get about 30 minutes of a great idea that showed up a little late.
http://www.mediafly.com/Podcasts/Episodes/The_Stan_Freberg_Show_Musical_Sheep_7141957
And thanks to the good people at www.mediafly.com for helping me find it in the first place.
Progress Creates Archives
Inventors need to stop. They are the reason we need to buy digital converter boxes to turn our TVs into useful tools come February. They are the reason we are considering getting rid of our gas lawn mowers, just like we got rid of that scythe we used for lawn-mowing.
Actually, inventors need to keep working. They are the reason archives exist, or at least have the romance factor they have, and that is what keeps "the archives"--as a physical location where the old stuff is kept--from being ust a larger, dirtier version of all the other stuff.
Here's a link to a blog, located with help from the good people at icerocket.com, that deals with the people that make progress and keep making new excuses for archives:
http://www.gizmag.com/historic-recordings-by-inventor-of-stereo-sound-are-digitally-re-engin/9746/
I've linked you to one post in particular from the semi-popular gizmag, a website-magazine devoted to forward-thinking people and weird business that keeps things interesting; without them, we wouldn't be obsolete--we'd be pretty much the same as we were yesterday, which might be worse. The first link is to gizmag's version of "interesting people;" the second is a link to today's post, which happens to announce the re-engineering of historic recordings made to demonstrate the concept of "stereophonic sound." At this point, I won't editorialize, I'll just leave it for you to read.
Keep listening.
Actually, inventors need to keep working. They are the reason archives exist, or at least have the romance factor they have, and that is what keeps "the archives"--as a physical location where the old stuff is kept--from being ust a larger, dirtier version of all the other stuff.
Here's a link to a blog, located with help from the good people at icerocket.com, that deals with the people that make progress and keep making new excuses for archives:
http://www.gizmag.com/historic-recordings-by-inventor-of-stereo-sound-are-digitally-re-engin/9746/
I've linked you to one post in particular from the semi-popular gizmag, a website-magazine devoted to forward-thinking people and weird business that keeps things interesting; without them, we wouldn't be obsolete--we'd be pretty much the same as we were yesterday, which might be worse. The first link is to gizmag's version of "interesting people;" the second is a link to today's post, which happens to announce the re-engineering of historic recordings made to demonstrate the concept of "stereophonic sound." At this point, I won't editorialize, I'll just leave it for you to read.
Keep listening.
...And I Can Barely Hear It
Welcome to the Compulsory Blog devoted to audio archives.
As a public library employee, I often have the pleasure of informing a patron of my library's massive collection of LPs. And not quite as often, I have the un-pleasure of informing someone of our abandonment (long ago) of other recording technologies--cassette or 8-track tape, for example. Of course, CDs are here to stay, aren't they? ...aren't they?
Each of these formats has its own strengths and weaknesses--but discussions in this area tend to be kind of dull, generally. It is not my intention to add to that slowly-growing body of literature. I am more interested in the contents of the recordings. That statement sounds a lot more smug than I intend for it to--perhaps I should say, I am more interested in the contents of the recordings, and the more oddball, the better. Of course, I am also interested in historically important or otherwise unique recordings, and especially those that have been rescued from some especially perishable medium, like a wax cylinder.
My interest in this corner of the recording museum grew out of a recording that I bought about 10 years ago, one I bought completely on speculation--it was called Early Ragtime: Roots and Offshoots, and it contained one track from the 1920s from a group calling themselves the Manila String Circle, a string band from the Philippines. That they played horribly out-of-tune by western standards was obvious, but what was just as obvious was that they cared about as much for western tuning standards as I do for boats--which is to say, not at all.
Here was a recording that, by most standards, should have been consigned to the musical slag-heap of history--but I'm so glad it wasn't. Return here to read more about things that probably should have been lost, but weren't, as well as things that are being done about that--especially in public libraries, but also elsewhere.
As a public library employee, I often have the pleasure of informing a patron of my library's massive collection of LPs. And not quite as often, I have the un-pleasure of informing someone of our abandonment (long ago) of other recording technologies--cassette or 8-track tape, for example. Of course, CDs are here to stay, aren't they? ...aren't they?
Each of these formats has its own strengths and weaknesses--but discussions in this area tend to be kind of dull, generally. It is not my intention to add to that slowly-growing body of literature. I am more interested in the contents of the recordings. That statement sounds a lot more smug than I intend for it to--perhaps I should say, I am more interested in the contents of the recordings, and the more oddball, the better. Of course, I am also interested in historically important or otherwise unique recordings, and especially those that have been rescued from some especially perishable medium, like a wax cylinder.
My interest in this corner of the recording museum grew out of a recording that I bought about 10 years ago, one I bought completely on speculation--it was called Early Ragtime: Roots and Offshoots, and it contained one track from the 1920s from a group calling themselves the Manila String Circle, a string band from the Philippines. That they played horribly out-of-tune by western standards was obvious, but what was just as obvious was that they cared about as much for western tuning standards as I do for boats--which is to say, not at all.
Here was a recording that, by most standards, should have been consigned to the musical slag-heap of history--but I'm so glad it wasn't. Return here to read more about things that probably should have been lost, but weren't, as well as things that are being done about that--especially in public libraries, but also elsewhere.
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