Date:         Mon, 15 May 2006 18:00:48 -0400
Reply-To:     Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List
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Sender:       Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List
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From:         steven c <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:      Re: National Recording Preservation Board (NRPB) Study
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----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tom Fine" <[log in to unmask]>
> I honestly didn't know there were 80,000 unique 78 sides recorded! What is
the material?
>
> Steven, do you think you have more disks than Joe Bussard? Did I
understand you correctly that you
> have 40 THOUSAND unique 78's (ie no repeats)? Or, how much of that is
overlap?
>
My estimate is that three million 78's were issued in North America
between 1892 (Berliner's first attempts) and 1960 (last commercial
78's pressed). That would be six million unique sides (or about
5.98 million, allowing for early/classical SF 78's). That gives
me just over 1% of the possible total!

I would currently guess an overlap of around 5%. I'm currently
doing a limited database of label/number only, just to identify
duplicates...at this point I have about 19,000 phonorecords in
data records, with less than a thousand duplications.

And...I suspect there are other privately-held shellac archives
that are larger!

Steven C. Barr