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Caffè Lena History Project’s Searchable Database

May 13, 2014

Caffè Lena opened in Saratoga Springs, NY in May of 1960. Since then, the coffee house has kept its doors open featuring predominately performances by folk musicians. Often the performers were at the start of their careers. The café has featured now familiar songwriters including Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, Ani DiFranco, and Kate and Anna McGarrigle – to name just a few. After the death of the founder, Lena Spencer, in 1989 Caffè Lena was converted to a non-profit institution.

The Caffè Lena History Project has launched an online searchable database for the complete Caffè Lena collection. The processing of this collection was made possible with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, administered through the Council on Library and Information Resources’ Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives Project. The digitization of the material was made possible through generous funding from the EMC Corporation.

This collection is physically in many places, but the Omeka based website serves as a centralized index for browsing and discovering the rich set of papers, audio recordings, photographs and ephemera documenting the history of this performance space. The database was architected by Monte Evans, who managed to bring together all the large and disparate data sets and organize them within Omeka. This database is the third part of the overall history project, which also produced a three-CD set of audio recordings and a lavish book documenting the history of the coffee house through stories and many previously unseen photos.

Over the course of more than 10 years, this project has been a labor of love by Jocelyn Arem to hunt for long lost caches of materials – in attics and garages and archives across the country. Then her efforts moved on to digitization and promotion of the amazing materials she found. She was supported by many people (in addition to the funders) who helped move the work forward — including dedicated community members, volunteers, the Caffè Lena Board of Directors, and friends around the country who shared their expertise and support.

The video above is the ‘trailer’ for the project and does a great job introducing both Caffè Lena and the history project through interviews, photographs and audio clips.

The Database

The contents of the website are divided into three sections — recordings, ephemera and photographs. While it is possible to search across the full array of contents, there are additional options for filtering by tags and sorting within each sub-section of the database.

Of all the materials gathered during this project, the audio recordings were the most elusive. In many cases it required detective work to track down recordings that were remembered by some and forgotten by others. Recordings donated from as far away as Ontario and Ohio, and digitized by the GRAMMY Award-winning Magic Shop Studio in NYC. Jocelyn Arem shared with me one of her favorite stories of serendipity during the search for recordings – that of the ZBS Radio Series tapes. A former ZBS producer in Panama, Robert Durand, contacted them because he heard about the project online. He connected them with an engineer at ZBS in New York. As a result they received the edited Caffè Lena ZBS collection. However they always wondered where the unedited tapes had ended up. A few months later, Jocelyn followed a trail to another engineer who had left a note at the Caffè years earlier saying he had tapes to donate. Along with former Caffè Lena board member (and audio tape donor) Dick Kavanaugh, she drove to the mountains of upstate, NY to retrieve the tapes from this new donor and lo and behold … there was the unedited Caffè Lena tape collection!

In the Recordings section of the site, you can find descriptive information about 514 recording now held by the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center.. The browse interface lets you filter by using a drop-down list of artist names. Occasionally the entries includes short audio samples you can listen to online, such as this one for Kate and Anna McGarrigle recorded during the 20th Anniversary Music Festival described on the flyer shown here. One thing that surprised me is that if sometimes an image will lead to a multi-page PDF. In the recording’s section this was common and the PDFs of the tape transfer reports include detailed notes about the recording.

The Ephemera section of the site features 32 boxes of materials from five separate collections, listed below.

the Lena Spencer Papers, Performer Files and Jan Nargi Collections — all held by the Saratoga Springs History Museum,
the Board of Directors Collection held by the American Folklife Center
the Lively Lucys Coffeehouse Collection held by Skidmore College

Each collection can be browsed individually, with their own dedicated options of filtering by tags. Here it was a bit more obvious that the image you saw was likely just the first page of a multi-page folder digitized and presented as a single PDF.

Finally, the Photographs section includes over 6,000 black and white photographs made by Joe Alper at Caffè Lena between 1960-1967. These images were catalogued and digitized by Edward Elbers and are held by the Joe Alper Photo Collection LLC. This section lets you filter by ‘artist’. For example, there are 296 photos of Bob Dylan.

Tagging and Controlled Vocabularies

One of the recurring challenges for those tagging content from multiple sources is the different versions of terms that mean the same thing. Controlled vocabularies are hard to enforce across different collections held by different organizations or individuals. In the case of the Caffè Lena History Project, I noticed that there were different values used for tagging across the materials. For example, the values used to tag and populate the list of recording artists’ names exactly match the names listed on the tape transfer reports. In some cases the same artist may be listed in multiple ways. For example, there are entries for The McGarrigles, Kate McGarrigle and Anna McGarrigle. Another example can be found in the tagging for materials related to Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan, bob, Dylan and Dylan Bob are all tags that give you different subsets of the search results that just searching on Dylan provides.

These types of issues are often compounded when materials come from so many different sources and through many different hands along the way. That said, the combination of artists lists, tags and search functions make it easy to discover materials related to your favorite folk music artists. Just keep in mind that looking for multiple versions of a performer’s name might help you find more materials.

Other Virtual Archives

The approach of creating a single website to unify materials that are not co-located but do all relate to a single unifying theme reminded me of two earlier projects: The Publishers’ Bindings Online (PBO) and the Greene & Greene Virtual Archive.

The Publishers’ Bindings Online project now features over 13,000 images online of over 5,000 book bindings from 1815 to 1930. These books are held in libraries at multiple institutions and the project’s success at (and challenges with) using a single unified vocabulary for tagging was discussed in detail during a session at SAA in 2007: Publishers’ Bindings Online – Digitization, Collaboration, Standardization and Community Building. I used the subject vocabulary to find a book cover featuring polar bears.

The Greene & Greene Virtual Archives presents materials of the southern California design firm Greene & Greene. Active from 1894-1922, they are associated with the architecture and craftsmanship of the American Arts and Crafts Movement. The Greene & Greene website presents images and metadata of a selected set of 4000 items held by four different repositories. They also provide links to the full descriptions of materials held by each of the repositories. The search functionality on the website is geared towards exploration of individual architectural projects, but also permits advanced search by topic, repository, location, document type and date. Unlike PBO and Caffè Lena, this site doesn’t expose the tagging that lets the results be returned by these groupings.

My Personal Connection

Finally, I would like to share my personal connection to this project. Jocelyn contacted me over a year ago while in the final stages of working on the book to ask if my father had taken a particular photo of Loudon Wainwright III. My father was his manager at the start of his career and did take many photos of him, though not the one in question.

After the launch of the site, I was curious to see what might be in the database related to Loudon and perhaps my father. I found this great photo in the Ephemera file for Wainwright Loudon. My father is the gentleman on the left with the mustache!

More about Caffè Lena

The New York Times published a great article back in 2013 that talks all about the history project and the two products which preceded the online database. In September 2013, the history project created a three CD box set featuring the best of the historical audio material: Live at Caffe Lena:Music From America’s Legendary Coffeehouse,1967-2013.

The book was released in October 2013. Soon to be available via a second printing direct from the publisher, you can still find copies of the first printing of Caffe Lena: Inside America’s Legendary Folk Music Coffeehouse on Amazon.com.

There is a traveling exhibit that can be brought to your local venue with tons of details available online. You can also subscribe to an online newsletter. If you have a project for which you would like to use any of the materials (audio included) – there is a form for making licensing requests.

Of course, one of the best sources of information about Caffè Lena and its founder are the materials featured on the history project website.

Finally, do you have materials to donate to the archive? You can contact the Caffè Lena History Project team directly via this online form.

Image Credits: Courtesy of the Caffè Lena Collection and the Saratoga Springs History Museum

Concertina History Online Features Virtual Collaboration and Digitization

January 10, 2010 2 Comments

In the early 1960s, my father bought a Wheatstone concertina in London. He tells how he visited the factory where it was made to pick one out and recalls the ledger book in which details about the concertinas were recorded. After a recent retelling of this family classic, I was inspired to see what might be online related to concertinas. I was amazed!

First I found the Concertina Library which presents itself as a ‘Digital Reference Collection for Concertinas’. With fourteen contributing authors, the site includes in depth articles on concertina history, technology, music, research and a wide range of concertina systems.

I particularly appreciate the reasons that Robert Gaskins, site creator, lists for the creation of the site on the about page:

(1) Almost all of the historical material about concertinas has been held in research libraries where access is limited, or in private collections where access may be non-existent. The reason for this is not that the material is so valuable, but that in the past there was no way to make material of limited interest available to everyone, so it stayed safely in archives. The web has provided a way to make this material widely available—partly by the libraries themselves, and partly in collections such as this.

(2) There seems to be a growing number of people working again on the history of concertinas, perhaps in part because research materials are becoming available on the web. These people are widely scattered, so they don’t get to meet and discuss their work in person. But again the web has provided an answer, allowing people to work collaboratively and exchange information across miles and timezones, and for the resulting articles the web offers worldwide publication at almost no cost.

What an eloquent testimonial for the power of the internet to both provide access to once-inaccessible materials and support virtual collaboration within a geographically dispersed community.

Next, I found the Wheatstone Concertina Ledgers. This site features business records (in the form of ledgers) of the C. Wheatstone & Co. stretching from 1830 through 1974 (with some gaps). The originals are held at the Library of the Horniman Museum in London. It is a great reference website with a nice interface for paging through the ledgers. Armed with the serial number from my father’s concertina (36461) I found my way to page 88 of a Wheatstone Production Journal from the Dickinson Archives. If I am reading that line properly, his concertina is a 3E model and was made (or maybe sold?) April 25, 1960. I wish that there was documentation online to explain how to read the ledgers. For example, I would love to know what ‘Bulletin 3052’ means.

I liked the way that they retained the sense of turning pages in a ledger. Every page of each ledger is included, including front and back end pages and blank pages. I have total confidence that I am seeing the pages in the same order as I would in person.

You can read the overview and introduction to the project, but what intrigued me more was the very detailed narrative of how this digitization effort was accomplished. In How The Wheatstone Concertina Ledgers Were Digitized, we find Robert Gaskins of the Concertina Library explaining how, with an older model IBM ThinkPad, a consumer grade scanner, and his existing software (Microsoft Office and Macromedia Fireworks), he created a website with 4,500 images and clean, simple navigation. From where I sit, this is a great success story – a single person’s dedication can yield fantastic results. You don’t need the latest and greatest technology to run a successful digitization project. One individual can go a long way through sheer determination and the clever leveraging of what they have on hand.

Back on the Concertina Library‘s about page we find “There is still a lot of material relevant to the study of concertinas and their history which should be digitized and placed on the web, but has not been so far. Ideas for additional contributors, items, and collections are very welcome.” If I am following the dates correctly, the Concertina Library has articles dating back to February of 2001, shortly before Mr. Gaskins started planning the ledger digitization project. At the same time as he was collaborating with other concertina enthusiasts to build the Concertina Library, he was scanning ledgers and creating the Wheatstone Concertina Ledgers website. Three cheers to Mr. Gaskins for his obvious personal enthusiasm and dedication to virtual collaboration, digitization and well-built websites! Another three cheers for all those who joined the cause and collaborated to create great online resources to support ongoing concertina research from anywhere in the world.

All this started because my father owns a beautiful old concertina. I love it when an innocent web search leads me to find a wealth of online archival materials. Do you have a favorite online archival resource that you stumbled across while doing similar research for family or friends? Please share them in the comments below!

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rocketlass/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Preserving Jewish Memory: Family Photos Join Oral History in Centropa Movies

February 18, 2009 1 Comment

Centropa. org features video photo montages that combine Jewish family photographs with oral history. I found my way to Centropa from the Time.com article Old Nazi News Makes Headlines in Germany which includes Kristallnacht in Words and Photographs from Centropa, but Centropa’s mission reaches beyond recalling the Holocaust. Centropa bills itself as “an interactive database of Jewish memory”.

The first oral history project that combines old family pictures with the stories that go with them, Centropa has interviewed more than 1,350 elderly Jews living in Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Sephardic communities of Greece, Turkey and the Balkans. With a database of 25,000 digitized images, we are bringing Jewish history to life in ways never done before.

Their fleet of 140 individuals conducted extensive oral interviews and digitized thousands of old family photos. They are quite intent on clarifying that they do not create videos during their sessions with their interviewees. Instead, they record audio of their multi-hour sessions, transcribe these sessions and combine them with the digitized family photos to create their movies.

The juicy center of their website is found in the Centropa Movies which are alternately billed as a “library of rescued memories” and a “digital bridge back to a world destroyed”. Their movies are also available via iTunes and on the CentropaOffice YouTube Channel. The movie I have included below tells the story of Judit Kinszki and focuses on her father Imre Kinszki, a budding photographer from Budapest, Hungary. From this movie’s Centropa Movie page you can also navigate to Judit Kinszki’s biography , the full family photo album and a study guide for this movie.

The amount of detail provided with each posted interview is really incredible. Biographies, detailed notes on each photo, the study guide, a family tree and a currently grayed out but promising link to “Discuss Movie”. This site has clearly given great thought to how to support teachers and has followed that vision through in the form of tons of supporting materials. Centropa has chosen the path of quality over quantity with the 17 movies currently posted.

Upon further reflection, I realize now that the movies are an outgrowth of the database of photographs and biographies. The detail was not added to support the videos – but rather the videos are the next step of evolution beyond the photos and interview transcripts.

In addition to the movies they offer a Recipe Archive, downloadable eBook versions of some of their interviews as well as Centropa Student, aimed at high schools in Europe, North America, and Israel. For those of you working on your own oral history projects, there is the Centropa Oral History Tool Kit, available in 5 languages. The Centropa Glossaries are less glossary and more a detailed list of people, social groups, events and terms that can be searched by country, type or keyword. Finally, don’t miss the ‘Narrated Stories and Introductions’ featured on the right sidebar on the Centropa Movies page, such as Maps, Central Europe and History or the Introduction to Centropa for US Students.

Reading Centropa’s claim that they are the first to combine the use of family photos and oral histories made me recall the University of Alaska Fairbank’s Project Jukebox. This project launched back in 1988 and aims to ” integrate oral history recordings with associated photographs, maps, and text.” The original was written using Hypercard!

They have a map showing all the communities in Alaska currently included as part of the project. A good example of an individual photo with accompanying narration is Harry Cook in his Garden from the Kiana Village History Project. No – it isn’t as elegantly assembled as the Centropa Movies, but the intention is much the same. They use old photos as a catalyst for helping individuals being interviewed and then combine the audio and images to improve end users’ understanding of the context of individual photos.

I have signed up with Centropa to be notified when they launch the promised ‘Add Your Family Photos’ feature. Until then I will keep scanning my own family’s photos, such as the one below featuring my grandfather (back row on the right), and working my way through all the Centropa Movies and their supporting materials.

SAA2008: Chinese Hammered Dulcimer + Tango = Archivists as Creative Collaborators

January 19, 2009 3 Comments

The official title of this session was Getting to the Heart of Performance: Archivists as Creative Collaborators. It was a lovely change of pace. Upon entering this session, we discovered someone tuning a Chinese hammered dulcimer in the middle of a social dance floor. Our hosts were Scott Schwartz of the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music, University of Illinios, Urbana-Champaign and Andrew M. Wentink of Middlebury College Special Collections & Archives. The goals of the session? To teach us about Asian American Jazz fusion and Tango.

Asian American Jazz Fusion

Dr. Anthony Brown, of Anthony Brown’s Asian American Orchestra, explained why there was a Chinese hammered dulcimer sitting in the middle of the room. Brown was going to introduce us to Asian and American Jazz fusion. The curator of the Smithsonian’s Duke Ellington Collection from 1992-1996, he discovered materials related to Ellington’s Far East Suite, originally composed to honor the people who welcomed Ellington during his state department tour (cut short by Kennedy’s assasination). Brown was able to trace Ellington’s itinerary through business records and then figure out the instruments that inspired the original in the Asian American Jazz Orchestra’s recording of Far East Suite. His next CD project was Monk’s Moods. The Asian American Jazz Orchestra is now celebrating its 10th anniversary with the release of a CD titled Ten.

Yangqin Zhao plays the Chinese hammered dulcimer and is the formost performer on the instrument in the western hemisphere. The dulcimer travelled via the silk road from persia. The silk road was the original information highway. It was the way east and west were connected in the ancient eras.

Then a recording of Monk’s Moods on piano was played. Then Zhao performed the same piece on the Chinese hammered dulcimer. To achieve this, Brown and Zhao had to work together to translate the original arrangement. Excerpt from Gershwin’s rapsody in blue – recomposition – reorchestrated for his orchestra. A piece of music or a dance chart cannot come to life until you breath life into it. Enabling access to performing arts is different.

The second piece that Zhao played was Andantino from Rhapsody in Blue. Samples of both Andantino and Monk’s Moods are available on the Ten CD page. Zhao then thanked Anthony for teaching her Jazz.

Tango

The dance portion of the session was brought to us by Richard Powers of Stanford University Dance Division and his dance partner Joan Walden. Powers founded the Flying Cloud Academy of Vintage Dance. He has a design and creative process degree from Stanford where he is an expert in 19th and early 20th century social dance. Stanford has an extensive dance manuals collections and Powers is the director of Stanford’s 70 member vintage dance ensemble.

Stanford Dance department wanted Richard to make dance more visible on campus to help make sure that it didn’t get cut (partially or completely). Outreach is important – strengthen funding or let potential donors know about you. He recommends that you can bring back dance manuals from your archive. With movies like Mad Hot Ballroom and Shall We Dance? and TV shows like Dancing With The Stars, the American public is predisposed right now to be interested in dancing. Most of the dances in dance manuals were meant for teaching regular people to dance so they could dance with their friends. They were part of a self improvement movement.

Think of unique way to encourage others to use archival records. Powers encourages everyone to NOT hand it off to others. Being a non-dancer gives you a better chance for colloboration. The more we know, the harder it is to get into a true collaboration. But if it is new for you you are more open minded and more open to true collaboration.

There are other resources beyond dance manuals: dance magazines, etiquette books, anti-dance manuals (which sometimes describe the illicit dances that the proper dance manuals won’t mention), novels that give background, journals/diaries/letters, iconography – lithographs, photos, drawings, etchings, sculptures .. to help get the visual idea.. costuming. Dance cards and ball programs give lots of information – when, who.. what music.. maybe where. This also gives you a chance to see which dances were popular (vs the manuals which are promoting dances). Motion pictures from the times. So – how can we weave all of this together?

For more information about how to reconstruct dances, read Powers’ Guidelines for Dance Research and Reconstruction.

We then got a crash course in Tango history. I took notes as fast as I could, but I know I missed a lot along the way. Here are the bits I managed to get down – but don’t trust me to be an authority:

100 years ago in Buenes Ares or Paris – you could find the argentinian tango. 1908 – just arrived in paris.. in the outskirts from Buenes Ares. But that version would seem simple. And then they danced!
1st Myth of the Tango: It was born in the brothels. His informed opinion is that it was created by the poor, but that doesn’t mean they were pimps & prostitutes. Most tango scholars today believe it was created by the honest poor in the bario.
2nd Myth of the Tango: The Tango was imported to Paris (1908-1912) and tamed by the French who found it too passionate and make it more appropriate for the ballroom. Lots of documentation from many sources that prove that the French ADDED more passion.. and that the dance was carried to Paris by young aristocrats.
Tango was presented in response to the dance called the Apache – exchanged influence from 1912-1914 in Paris.
A Buenes Arnes dance manual from 1914 (dated by the illustrations) called El Tango Argentino includes detailed illustrations and foot diagrams. Going back to the source shows us the meaning behind the names and rules about steps. Most drama and stalking was added 15 years later.
The true roots of Tango are unknown.
The main trunk of Tango is the version known in Paris 100 years ago.. social Tango today is still the same. Three branches of
Tango are: 1) stage performance (more dramatic), 2) ballroom competition and 3) Beunes Ares – every 10 years or so it changes dramatically.

Then they got everyone up and out on the dance floor. We went from learning history and thinking about how to one might decipher dance manuals to actually learning to Tango!

My Thoughts

If you are wondering why I am posting this over four months after the conference – you can blame Beaver Archivist’s post about Dancing Archivists. It immediately made me recall the largest gathering of dancing archivists I had personally witnessed. The session itself was really great. It was so far from people sitting in silent rows staring at powerpoint slides (not that there is anything wrong with that) that you might have thought you had wandered into the wrong conference.

It was the takeaway that was especially appealing to me. I really like the idea of finding new ways to bring performance based archives back to life – of finding new ways to reach out to people and make the records sing and dance again. Hearing music reinterpreted and reinvented is of course fundamentally different from seeing sheet music in a glass case. What if every archives that had performance art related records found a way to have two live, participatory events each year? I can only imagine the new audience who might be drawn in to learn about what is hidden in the archives — they might just come back because it is fun. My fingers are crossed that I can get my 2nd Tango lesson in Austin, TX in August 2009.

As is the case with all my session summaries from SAA2008, please accept my apologies in advance for any cases in which I misquote, overly simplify or miss points altogether in the post above. These sessions move fast and my main goal is to capture the core of the ideas presented and exchanged. Feel free to contact me about corrections to my summary either via comments on this post or via my contact form.

Library of Congress Inauguration 2009 Audio and Video Project

January 14, 2009

Amazing how much can change in 100 years. In March of 1909, the stereograph above shows African Americans driving the carriage that carried President and Mrs. Taft from the Capitol to lead the inauguration parade to the White House. On January 20th of 2009, Barack Obama will be the guest of honor. The American Folklife Center‘s Inauguration 2009 Sermons and Orations Project aims to collect recordings, transcriptions and ephemera of speeches addressing the significance of the inauguration of Barack Obama as the first African American president.

It is expected that such sermons and orations will be delivered at churches, synagogues, mosques and other places of worship, as well as before humanist congregations and other secular gatherings. The American Folklife Center is seeking as wide a representation of orations as possible.

The Inauguration 2009 project is modeled after prior Library of Congress collection projects. Two great examples of these earlier projects are:

“Man-on-the-Street” Interviews Following the Attack on Pearl Harbor – features audio recordings of the reactions of than 200 people to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
September 11, 2001, Documentary Project – includes 200 audio recordings collected between September 13, 2001 and February 13, 2002 in cities across the United States

If you want to organize a local recording, here are the basics:

Recording must be made between Friday, January 16th and Sunday, January 25th, 2009 and postmarked by February 27, 2009.
The project website provides the required Participant Release Form for speakers, photographers and those making the recordings.
The project is accepting audio recordings, video recordings, and written texts of sermons (see their detailed specifications page for information about accepted formats). Also accepted will be accompanying ephemera such as photographs and printed programs.
If you are sending materials to the Library of Congress, they encourage you to use FedEx, UPS, or DHL because of the danger of damage due to security screening done to USPS packages.

If you want to get a taste of other recordings held by the Library of Congress, you can spend some time browsing the fantastic list of Collections in the Archive of Folk Culture Containing Sermons and Orations provided on the project site.

So spread the word. Honor the Library of Congress’s goals by helping this collection include the perspectives of as many communities as possible. Your local religious or secular leader could have their point of view preserved as part of a snapshot of our country’s response to the Inauguration of 2009. While they hope for audio and video recordings, they are also accepting text transcriptions – so this doesn’t have to be a high tech endeavor. That said, perhaps this is the inspiration you have been waiting for to learn how to make an audio or video recording!

129th anniversary of Thomas Edison’s Invention of the Phonograph

November 21, 2006 2 Comments

Phonograph Patent Drawing by T.A. Edison. May 18, 1880. RG 241.Patent #227,679

In honor of today’s 129th anniversary of Thomas Edison’s announcement of his invention of the phonograph, I thought I would share an idea that came to me this past summer. I had the pleasure of taking a course on Visual and Sound Materials taught by Tom Connors, the curator of the National Public Broadcasting Archives. This course explored the history of audio recording, photography, film and broadcasting technology.

When explaining the details of the first phonographs, Prof. Connors mentioned that certain sounds recorded better. Recordings of horns and the pitch of tenor singers were reproduced most accurately – or at least played back with the best sound. We also talked about the change in access to music brought about eventually by the availability of records at the corner store. The most popular recordings were (not surprisingly) of music with lots of horns or the recordings of individual singers like Enrico Caruso. So my question is how might music have evolved differently if different music had sounded better when reproduced by the phonograph? Would Caruso have been replaced at the top of the heap by someone else with a different vocal range? Would Jazz music evolved differently? Would there have been other types of music altogether if string instruments or wind instruments reproduced as well as the bright sounding horns?

In our class we also discussed the impact of the introduction of long playing records. Suddenly you could have 30 minutes of music at a time – with no need to have anyone playing the piano or hovering over the phonograph to change the disk. This led to the movement of music into the background of daily life – in contrast with the earlier focus on playing live music for entertainment in people’s homes. It also paved the way for people to experience music alone – you no longer needed to be in the same room as the musicians. No longer was music exclusively something shared and witnessed in a group. In my opinion this was the start of the long path that led to the possibility of having your own personal ‘sound track’ via first the walkman and now the digital audio player such as the iPod.

These ideas are still about archives and research. From my point of view it is just another example of how a different kind of context can impact our understanding of history. There are so many ways in which little events can impact the big picture. Edison wasn’t pursuing a dream of access to music (though that was included on his list of possible uses for the phonograph) – he was more interested in dictation, audio books for the blind and recording the last words of the soon to be dearly departed.

I love having the ability to examine the original ideas and intentions of an inventor and it came as no surprise to me that some of the most interesting resources out there for learning more about Edison and his invention of the phonograph traced back to both the Library of Congress and the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. The LOC’s American Memory project page for The Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies gives a wide range of access to both background information and the option to listen to early Edison recordings. NARA’s page for the digital image above (originally found in Wikipedia) can be found online via NARA’s Archival Research Catalog (ARC) by searching for ‘Edison Phonograph’.

Hurrah for the invention of the phonograph and for all the archives that keep information for us to use in exploring ideas! Listen for horns and tenor voices in the next song you hear – and noticed if you are listening alone or with a group.

A final question: how can providing easy access to more big picture historical context help users to understand how the records they examine fit into the complicated real world of long ago?

Introduction

July 19, 2006 2 Comments

My name is Jeanne. I am a graduate student in an Archives program pursuing my MLS (aka, Master of Library Science). I have enjoyed all my classes to date (3) and I love the ideas that those classes have generated. Sometimes I leave class with just as many personal ideas scrawled in the margins of my notebook as class notes written on the main page. I am especially intrigued by the ways in which concepts from different fields intersect. How do ideas from my current field of software development and database design illuminate new issues, questions and concepts in the realm of archival studies?

I am particularly interested in topics related to audio and visual archival materials, digitization, description, meta-data, and retention of context in digitized collections.

So, here we are – you reading and I writing. I hope to make you think about things in a way you may not have before. I hope if you have been down the mental road I am taking and you have noticed something that I have missed, you might take a moment to point it out to me.

Please – ask questions and let me know your thoughts.

Category: audio