Re: [ARSCLIST] A scenario for bequests

[steven austin <stevena@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Many here are administers of private archives, and these surely must be
accessible to scholars and enthusiasts after a bit of qualification.
Some collections have limited access simply because they are
stand-alones and private passions. Sad to say, there is no single source
or network for all recorded music. However...

On-line accessibility of collections is simply the best-ever innovation.
No more trudging across the country to some library to sit in a nasty
listening booth...only to find the material is not where it should be.
That quality of access is still available, but for most listeners, the
effort is forbidding.

I'm yearning for the day when everyone posts their collections as MP3s
(and for video, a single adequate file format, instead of the dozens of
fussy little incompatible file types we see today).

And, yes, I'm talking through my hat" I don't have a single file posted.

So, Mark...where are you, and is your collection open? I find Japanese
pop and enka very enjoyable, but tough to survey. There use to be a nice
selection of pop hits from the 20s forward online, but it finally went
dark.

Steven Austin



-----Original Message-----
From: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List
[mailto:ARSCLIST@xxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Mark Takasugi
Sent: Friday, February 25, 2005 9:36 AM
To: ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] A scenario for bequests

I got started on an ethnic Japanese recordings
collection by discovering a
stash of 78s in the bowels of a local Japanese
retirement home while a
volunteer during junior high school.  Well-meaning
donors had gifted the
home with the recordings, thinking the "older folks"
would enjoy the older
music.  The institution, of course, lacked the
know-how and resources to
create any kind of meaningful circulation system, and
rather than refuse
such donations, accepted them and quietly relegated
them to a basement store
room, where I found them.  Legalities aside (this was
almost thirty years
ago), the director of the home was more than happy to
have me cart them
away.  It took quite a few bus trips to get them home.
 Would they be of
interest to an institution or collector?  I don't
know.  Some labels and
artists are so obscure that I can't find mention of
them even in the
"uber-documentation" on the Internet in Japanese, let
alone in English.

I'm not familiar with the legal obligations associated
with bequests, or the
capacity of institutions to manage disposition, if you
will, of "unwanted"
material, but surely a way can be found to make them
available to
individuals or other institutions that may be looking
for them and indeed
offer, as Steve indicates, a cozy home?

Mark Takasugi

-----Original Message-----
From: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List
[mailto:ARSCLIST@xxxxxxx] On Behalf Of steven austin
Sent: Friday, February 25, 2005 7:28 AM
To: ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] A scenario for bequests

May I be the first to offer a cozy home to private
collections that are
refused on the basis of being a preservation burden?

Steven Austin



-----Original Message-----
From: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List
[mailto:ARSCLIST@xxxxxxx] On Behalf Of George
Brock-Nannestad
Sent: Friday, February 25, 2005 4:49 AM
To: ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ARSCLIST] A scenario for bequests

From: Patent Tactics, George Brock-Nannestad

In the mood of the scenario that I posted about
earlier today (but which has
not appeared as I write, because " ARSCLIST list is
held") I am considering
the following:

Some private collections are donated to public
collections, generating tax
deductions in the process. It also generates work for
valuers to find out
what these deductions might be. However, if receiving
a collection puts a
burden on the receiving agency to digitize and
maintain the collection, I
would expect that the deduction should properly be
converted into a
supplementary tax burden on the donor. In other words,
if the collection
does not come with the money to preserve it, then it
could potentially be
refused.

In a similar vein, the materials that could be
privately inherited from a
"modern" collector could potentially be a payment of,
say, ten years of
professional maintenance of the backup of the sounds
he has collected.
Such
payments could also be put up for public auction
(similar to works of art
today). This message will self-destruct in 315,619,200
seconds.
Inheritance
sucks. Or it certainly will, at some point in our
development.

Kind regards,

George


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