[ARSCLIST] Victor Records Discography Project Moves to UCSB

[David Seubert <seubert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The following announcement has just been made by the University of 
California, Santa Barbara.

The UCSB Libraries are pleased to announce that noted discographer, 
collector and author William R. Moran of La Cañada, Calif. has chosen the 
UCSB Davidson Library as the new location for the ongoing project to 
complete of the Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Records. A multi-volume 
work with discographic information on all recordings made by the Victor 
Talking Machine Company (later purchased by RCA) from 1900 to 1950, the 
series is a cornerstone in the ongoing scholarly documentation of early 
recorded sound.

Begun by Mr. Moran in the 1960s with his late co-author Ted Fagan, 
principal translator for the United Nations, the first two volumes of the 
Discography were published in 1983 and 1986 by Greenwood Press and remain 
standard reference texts on early sound recordings. Mr. Moran has 
established the William R. Moran Fund for Recorded Sound at UCSB to ensure 
that their lifelong work is completed and that the recorded output of one 
of the most significant cultural forces of the early 20th century will be 
documented for researchers. The Library will be hiring a discographer and 
support staff to continue the editorial project and begin planning for 
publication of future volumes and an online database of the recordings. In 
addition to the extensive documentation that Mr. Moran and Mr. Fagan 
gathered in their work at the Victor archives, the research project will 
draw on material held by the UCSB Libraries and other institutions.

Mr. Moran, a retired executive with Union Oil Company, traveled the world 
collecting 78 rpm records and researching the artists that recorded for the 
Victor Company. His research has appeared in dozens of articles and he 
wrote and edited several other books including a book on singer Nellie Melba.

Moran?s choice of the UCSB Libraries highlights the ongoing work by the 
Libraries to preserve recorded sound for future generations of scholars and 
enthusiasts. With one of the largest collections of pre-WWII sound 
recordings in the country, the Special Collections Department is recognized 
as a leader in the field of preservation and dissemination of early sound 
recordings. Mr. Moran previously gave several thousand of his recordings to 
the Library in 2001 and engineered a reissue of historic recordings by 
Lotte Lehmann released by the Library in 1988.

The project's website is at http://www.library.ucsb.edu/speccoll/pa/victor.html

David Seubert, Curator
Performing Arts Collection
Davidson Library Special Collections
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA  93106
(805) 893-5444 Fax (805) 893-5749
mailto:seubert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.library.ucsb.edu/speccoll/pa/