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Greetings:
You might have seen the AP story,
yesterday, about the federal spending bill signed last week. Did you
wonder about the University of Idaho getting money for its jazz
archive? I'm the archivist. I think the article may have
overstated, a wee tad, our plans for a website, saying that we will put the
entire collection on the internet: photos, recordings, scores, artifacts, and
all. We will have a website, in time, but just now I hope to get an
office and chair and phone to call my own. Some tables and space and
boxes and folders to do the physical processing of the collection that we have
accumulated would be nice, too. That's coming. We'll be
joining ARSC, and I'll be needing help from this listserv as we
proceed. I look forward, particularly, to dealing with others with other
jazz archives.
We are, admittedly, off the commonly perceived jazz
circuit, here in north Idaho. You might be asking yourselves: "What, is
jazz the preferred music of white supremacists?" News about the
Aryan Nation compound, north of here 100 miles or so, usually overshadows
the fact that Lionel Hampton has been heading up a jazz festival in Moscow,
every February, for some years. We have his papers, as well as those
of the late jazz critic Leonard Feather. We also have the standard fare
for sound archives, to judge from the websites I've visited and the few
conversations I've had, thus far, with media archivists: tape and records
of several dimensions, and now cds. We've been promised some wax and foil
cylinders, along with the machines that used to play them. Not that I would
allow use of the cylinders on old equipment. I know more about film
and videotape than about sound recording and sound
recording equipment, but many of the same conservation and preservation
rules apply. Back in my graduate school days, at Syracuse U., I stopped in
often enough at the sound archives bunker (handy by the library and the
communications school) to absorb this basic instruction: These things
are fragile, be careful! Now that our collection processing
money is really, truly promised, I'll be reading up and asking you for
more detailed advice as the need arises.
I thank for your attention.
Michael Tarabulski
Jazz Archivist
International Jazz Collection
University of Idaho
Moscow, ID
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