Re: [ARSCLIST] The Grey Gull Transfer Project (was Re: [78-l] Grey Gull)

[Dick Spottswood <dick@xxxxxxxx>]

Dear Jon,
        Untangling, organizing and preserving all those Grey Gulls,
Radiexes, Van Dykes, Supremes and Madisons is a challenging task and a
worthwhile one.  What's fascinating is that GG had all the aspects of a
fly-by-night operation, but it lasted for more than a decade.  It'll be
interesting to see how it works on line--good luck with all aspects.
Dick





Jon Noring <jon@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent by: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxx>
10/14/2004 11:11 AM
Please respond to Jon Noring

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        Subject:        [ARSCLIST] The Grey Gull Transfer Project (was Re:
[78-l] Grey Gull)


Everyone,

Just a heads up...

Regarding Grey Gull, Sound Preserve (aka Project Gramophone) is very
interested in digitizing every known Grey Gull-related record we can
get our hands on. In addition to digitizing each side and putting them
online for research purposes, we'll digitally photograph each label
and runout area at high-rez (and these images will also be available
online), and plan to mobilize a few volunteers to manually transfer the
data from the label scans to a discographical (or more appropriately
'labelography') database.

The value of having much if not all of the GG corpus online (both
recordings, label photographs and discographical data) is that a group
of interested discographers can work together world-wide to finally
untangle the mess that is Grey Gull. There are times when listening to
the recordings themselves is necessary to assemble the discography (e.g.,
identify performers, resolve alternate takes, etc.) Of course, there is
historical and musical value in the recordings themselves independent of
discographical interest -- GG represents a great era in recorded
sound (even if the sound quality of GG is marginal for that era.)

(Of course, we'll scan any written material which exists about GG,
such as advertisements, record sleeves, articles of that time and
later research findings, and even ledgers if any exist, and get that
online. We may even rely on Digital Proofreaders' system to convert
any scanned text images into higher quality digital text so it is
structured properly and searchable online.)

If any of you have a collection of GG-group records, large or small,
and are willing to loan them to us for digitization purposes, contact
either Eric Jacobs at ericj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx or me. We'll even
consider donations of GG collections (we will be a non-profit 501(c)3,
and in effect are now 501(c)3 via our association with the Internet
Archive). But we are not sure we want to go the route of building a
record collection (to any significant extent anyway) since maintaining
a collection of records will require significant time and money to do
properly, both better spent on transferring/digitizing. It largely
depends upon if Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive will build an
archival-quality storage facility he has considered for storing books,
old software, and other fragile and outright odd media artifacts that
IA will acquire as part of their long-term digitization effort. Right
now they have a few closets of oddball stuff they've acquired, such as
old boxed software (they want to digitally preserve old software!)

We're not yet ready to do the transfers, but would like to begin
finding out who is willing to share their collection of GG-records,
whether large or small. We have no problem with duplicating the more
"common" GG recordings from various collections. Not only will this
give everyone more choice in transfers to work with but may help
resolve alternate takes in a few cases.

Of course, we could use one or more knowledgeable GG collectors to
advise us on GG in general, to assure we get as complete coverage as we
can. From my perusing through the Abrams file on GG, GG is certainly a
real can of worms discographically-speaking. As a final note, I assume
that the ownership of the GG recordings (those done by GG itself, not
licensed from other companies) has been 'abandoned', and thus the
recordings (but not the song titles, a different issue) are
effectively public domain since no one can claim legitimate title to
them (and certainly they could not produce any metal masters to prove
ownership unless the metal masters were secreted from all collector
knowledge until now!) We do intend to contact the Shaw family to see
if we can get their blessing for the project (even if none is needed
legally-speaking) -- they may even want to be involved in some manner.

Thanks!

Jon Noring
Sound Preserve (aka 'Project Gramophone')