Re: [ARSCLIST] A Visit With Fred Williams

[David Seubert <seubert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

For a variety of reasons we hadn't made an announcement yet, but it's 
true, the bulk of Fred Williams' 78rpm band music collection has been 
acquired by UCSB. As Mike said, we were indeed very interested in 
acquiring and making Fred's cylinders accessible through our website, 
but the entire collection was a good fit for us in other ways. Broadly, 
our acquisitions priorities are cylinders, early acoustic recordings, 
and ethnic and foreign discs, though we collect 78rpm discs 
comprehensively. Fred's collection was strong in all three areas. We 
already have good popular, operatic, and ethnic collections and this 
filled in another area that was central to early recorded sound--concert 
and military band music. Getting the collection out of his house and to 
Santa Barbara was quite a job. For those of you that visited Fred over 
the years, you'll understand, though it actually only took one semi to 
get it to Santa Barbara. More information on the collection can be found 
here: http://www.library.ucsb.edu/speccoll/collections/pa/pamss72.html 
(Be sure to look at the pictures on the second page.)

I do want to also mention that the majority of our acquisitions (and 
those of every other archive) are still through donation, and that we do 
take donations, large and small, provided they fit our collecting policy 
and we have the resources to deal with them. We very rarely purchase 
collections. The tax advantages of making a donation can be more 
attractive than the prices paid by institutions or dealers. There is 
almost no market for large collections and the only way to get retail 
prices is to sell piece by piece.

Upon the encouragement of several ARSC members, Fred's papers and 
research files are also here, so eventually there will be the "Fred P 
Williams Papers" with all of his research files on band music, which are 
quite extensive. Will look forward to making these accessible to future 
generations of aficionados and researchers.

Finally, as many of you also know, UCSB doesn't just warehouse our 
collections. We are already cataloging his collection and many of the 
cylinders will be digitized with the support of a Grammy Foundation 
grant. You'll find what's already been cataloged here:

http://pegasus-16.library.ucsb.edu/F/?func=find-e&find_scan_code=FIND_WRD&request=frederick+p+williams+collection&x=21&y=10&adjacent=N&local_base=SBA01PUB 


Please email me off list if you have any questions.

David

--
David Seubert, Curator
Performing Arts Collection
Davidson Library
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9010
Tel: 805-893-5444 Fax: 805-893-5749
seubert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.library.ucsb.edu/speccoll/collections/pa/