Quoting Mike Richter <[log in to unmask]>:
> Given unlimited time and funds to make the archives, categorize the
> material and disseminate the results, "dead" audio should be preserved.
> That is hardly a 'need' by any measure I know. The harp solo is all well
> and good, but the collection of all such recordings by all such children is
> not worthy. I would have no problem with one recording of each Girl Scout
> song in a given era (so long as I am not required to listen to it), but
> preserving the hundreds or thousands of different performances is without
> justification.
I obviously can't disagree with this argument altogether but, were you to only
select one, by what process would you choose a lone representative recording of
each of these songs? Is a recording recorded at a campfire in Omaha, Nebraska
in 1954 more 'authentic' than one performed by a group of girls in Brooklyn in
1978? Seems to me that there's a legitimate case for preserving a number of
interpretations. It is, after all, modern folk culture. It goes without saying
that no one has the funds to preserve everything, so I'm not suggesting some
sort of W.W.A.D.? (What Would Asch Do?) theory, but there are some serious
issues involved in deaccesioning recordings of this nature.
Brandon Burke
Graduate Research Assistant
Digital Library Services
University of Texas at Austin
(512) 495-4566
[log in to unmask]
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> At 02:25 PM 7/4/2003 -0400, [log in to unmask] wrote:
>
> >This is why there needs to be a way of preserving "dead" audio; one that
> >requires no maintenance and what will survive literal burial. It would be
> for
> >material of no conceivable commercial value, but that would be of interest
> to
> >historians trying to reconstruct the procedures and practices of the past.
> >
> >As a result of this thread I finally played some of the discs that have
> >survived many years storage in a damp, occasionally flooded
> >basement: 1/19/54:
> >Harp solo by the daughter of a local broadcast engineer; 4/23/57: Girl
> Scouts
> >singing Camp songs; 6/12/41: amazingly inept church choir; 10/19/53: two
> >Carhardt commercials; 6/14/46: roundtable discussion of local issues;
> >194?: local air
> >raid Alert & All Clear; Sentinel TV commercials; interviews of 1st graders
> >at an animal lending library.
>
> I beg to differ.
>
> Given unlimited time and funds to make the archives, categorize the
> material and disseminate the results, "dead" audio should be preserved.
> That is hardly a 'need' by any measure I know. The harp solo is all well
> and good, but the collection of all such recordings by all such children is
> not worthy. I would have no problem with one recording of each Girl Scout
> song in a given era (so long as I am not required to listen to it), but
> preserving the hundreds or thousands of different performances is without
> justification.
>
> Collections of such ephemera are entertaining and can be informative, but
> the value of each item diminishes rapidly as the number saved increases.
> The next step would be to preserve every document turned in by any student
> in any school. Though a compilation of oddities is marketable and the
> scribblings of a child who becomes an author have historical interest, the
> hundreds of essays, tests and other papers generated annually by each of
> the tens of millions of American schoolchildren (not to add those in India,
> China and the rest of the world) are not worth preserving.
>
> It may be heresy to some, but I firmly believe that there are frames of
> home movies which should be scrapped, diaries which should be recycled, and
> audio recordings which should be allowed to expire gracefully.
>
>
> Mike
> [log in to unmask]
> http://www.mrichter.com/
>
