Re: [ARSCLIST] 100K+ Jazz records going to Oberlin

[Tom Fine <tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I was thinking the same thing.

If I were project manager of ingesting this massive collection, the first thing I would do is assign 
a team of research interns to separate every title that is available as in-print CD's. I would 
estimate, given the massive reduction of jazz catalogs in recent years, this might cover 1/4 to 1/3 
of the collection. Next, I would separate titles that were out on CD at one time but are now out of 
print but the CD can be purchased used or new-old-stock for a reasonable price (ie less than the 
cost of transfer and archiving). This might then cover another 1/3 or the collection, so anywhere 
from 1/3 to just under 1/2 will probably have never been released as CD's and thus will require 
transfer.

I base these estimates simply on my own jazz LP collection, which is much smaller. A surprisingly 
large number of titles never made it to CD. However, some or all of the songs on those titles may 
have made it to various collections. I am assuming the intent of the digitization would be to 
preserve the original album sequences. If one were to hunt song-by-song to compile albums, it gets 
expensive and one often ends up with half or less of an album.

By the way, for the librarians on this list, you should take an afternoon some time and see how many 
of your circulating CD's are easily replaced. You might be horrified to find that many of them are 
out of print, especially if you have a large classical or jazz collection in circulation. This is 
also the case with audiobooks that aren't best-sellers -- generally there is a small production run 
of a title and a replacement copy is an expensive one-off duplicated by the publisher. As I 
understand fair-use, a library is within its rights to circulate a duplicate as long as they own and 
keep the original CD. I believe someone linked to a Stanford-based report on fair-use that detailed 
this a while back. I borrow a lot of classical CD's from the local library system because I like to 
listen to music during the office days. I'm often disappointed to get unplayable damaged discs, and 
then random checks often indicate the disc is out of print and some or all of its contents is not 
included in the more recent reissie/re-combination/re-themed collection.

-- Tom Fine



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Matthew Snyder" <msnyder@xxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2007 9:17 AM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] 100K+ Jazz records going to Oberlin


> >its complete recorded contents will be transferred to digital
> > files.
>
> Oberlin is going to digitize thousands of albums which may already be
> commercially available in digital form? That can't possibly be the case.
>
> Matt Snyder
> Music Archivist
> Wilson Processing Project
> The New York Public Library