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Re: [ARSCLIST] Who is accepting old record collections?
Hi B --
The cover art alone is HIGHLY useful! One of the big losses with downloads is lack of cover arts and
notes, which means lack of context for album-length and older recordings, especially in jazz or
classical. Cover art and notes were a carefully commissioned and costly part of an LP back in the
day. The tradition definitely continued in some carefully conceived and executed CD booklets. Some
of the tiny-player downloads places offer PDF of booklets (Chesky's HDTracks, for example), but
iTunes and Amazon do not, so about 90% of the download market doesn't ever get access to this
material. If I understand you correctly, you will have clearence to have publicly available
good-resolution scans of fronts and backs of LP covers, allowing a person to read the notes and view
the art. This will be a tremendous cultural asset for music fans and collectors.
-- Tom Fine
----- Original Message -----
From: "B. George" <arcmusic@xxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, April 08, 2009 11:43 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Who is accepting old record collections?
Tom - Thanks for the note. Those thumbnail covers once linked to a larger image, so I don't know
what happened. I'll try and get fixed this weekend. We do archival scans, as this is a major use
by the record companies of our collection (we are currently working on Verve reissues, and just
finished 900 scans for the new Grammy Hall of Fame and Museum in LA), so hi-res copies of all of
these covers are preserved. Its not your monitor.
Our goal is to use this new partnership with Columbia to mount our entire catalog. I will be
presenting a version, and I hope not vaporware, at the ARSC confab in DC in May. We'll start
with the 50,000 world music recordings, and then mount another 1/2 million LPs + CDs. I want to
offer useful metadata, displayed in one line of text, all the data on one screen. This will be
available free to all, the whole list easily downloadable. We catalog about 300 recordings a
day here. Eventually the whole library will be online.
b.ARC
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On your website, you have a section on the Keith Richards blues collection. Below the text about
the Robert Johnson 78, you have a tiny gallery of blues album covers. Question -- how can one
"read" these covers and thus explore the albums when the pictures are such tiny thumbnails? My
monitor is a typical high-resolution PC monitor, nothing super-fine. Normal desktop icons are
normal sized, so I believe the tiny image sizes originate at the website. Perhaps it would be
good to simply list the album titles, and better yet to state which are still in print and
available on CD.
-- Tom Fine