Re: [ARSCLIST] For the NRPB study: correlations between archives, collections, and resources

[Richard Warren <richard.warren@xxxxxxxx>]

Dear Mr. S. Gander, err, Rob,

It was a pleasure to meet and hear from and about you at the ARSC conference.

My impression is that your crude hypothesis seems pretty valid to 
this gander, who's been around the audio archive field for over 40 
years, in fairly regular touch with many library colleagues (that's 
how we all got our professional training: conferences and meetings 
and projects -- and we all agreed that there couldn't have been a 
better way or a finer group of colleagues: those still active are Ted 
Sheldon, Don McCormick succeeded some of the time by Sara Velez, Sue 
Stinson; those retired: Elwood McKee, Gerry Gibson, Barbara Sawka, 
Bill Storm).

Sidebar: I have a good friend, fellow choral singer, who got a job at 
Harvard, which sent him to Library school. He knew my interest, then 
a hobby, and carefully examined the program of the Library school he 
attended to see what material might be useful/essential for working 
in an audio archive in some capacity OTHER than cataloguing -- which 
by the way I was taught on the job at Yale. He found approx. 1 week 
of one course might be helpful; so I didn't bother to go to Lib. 
School.  Another corollary of that story is that when and if I retire 
at Yale, I understand that a Library degree will be an essential 
prerequisite for the next candidate -- YIKE.

As you must know, Yale is, at least for a private university, large 
and pretty well fixed for resources. The Yale Collection of 
Historical Sound Recordings is probably the smallest of the major 
recorded sound archives because of collecting in limited subject 
areas (we really do NOT collect folk music or pop music except for 
Broadway) but, based on one RDI project study, the holder of more 
early commercial recordings not duplicated in other collections than 
any other. The collection is widely known and is used as much as 
possible. But there's the rub: my statistics are not to hand just 
now, but staffing levels during my 40 years here have ranged from 2 
when I began, down to 1 for a few years, then up to 3 for a few 
years, then back to 1 for several years, and now 1.5 for the past 
couple of years (preceded by one part-time position paid for and 
performing a special project not related directly to public service).

The department is the smallest in the Library system and used to be 
exempted from Library-wide mandated budget cuts because its budget 
was too small to be significant (and the only way to do a 
specific-percent budget cut would have been to chop my salary, which 
is a type of cut Yale doesn't do). The budget covered salary (ies), 
office supplies, an occasional batch of storage envelopes, equipment 
repairs (but only twice a few hundred $$ for new items of playback 
equipment -- nearly every item of audio equipment on hand was 
donated), and acquisitions. For only about the last dozen years has 
collection space been climate-controlled Spring-Fall (there's always 
been heat in the Winter). Also, we've been granted some preservation 
funding in recent years, and have joined with NYPL and Stanford in a 
Mellon-grant project for joint cataloguing. Our current University 
Librarian (formerly head of Special Collections, including the 
National Sound Archive, at the British Library) and the current and 
former Music Librarians have been most helpful to HSR.

When there were 3 full-time, the staff could keep up with the 
research workload, spend the acquisitions budget, and make gradual 
progress coping with donations, accessions, preservation, and finding 
aids. Since that time, "backlog" and "behind" have been the 
watchwords. One of the killers was the (words fail, no discussion 
allowed) decision to move all the recordings in the collection to 
storage in a building about one mile from the Library, which houses 
the Collection's office and playback studio, and then the subsequent 
happening of a wait of about 10 years before a special project to 
unpack the recordings in storage in order to reduce finding-time for 
requested recordings from 1-2 hours apiece to 1-5 minutes apiece. 
While I have to say that the exercise nearly every day has been good 
for my health, it's rather difficult to come up with any other 
benefits of this situation, which is now permanent.

Please feel free to ask follow-up or other types of questions.

With best wishes, Richard



At 04:58 PM 5/24/2006, you wrote:
> The conference in Seattle was great. I only regret not getting to meet
> and talk at length with as many people as I would have liked. (OK, I
> better tell the truth; I also regret not acting fast enough to get a
> Buttersnipes CD from the band...but will get one as soon as I figure out
> where on my shelves to establish a Punk/Girl Band section...maybe
> between Lillie Delk Christian and Ina Ray Hutton?)
>
> You might recall from a previous post that I'm the one who's been
> tapped to write the NRPB study.  One of the most difficult elements in
> the study will be to meaningfully characterize the population out there
> of institutional archives and the nature of their holdings. To that end,
> I'd like to solicit help from those who can, and who care to comment.
> I'd like to validate or overturn an impression that I came away with
> from Seattle. Please excuse if this is a crude hypothesis, a statement
> of the blatantly obvious or totally off-the-beam.
>
> Specifically: That there is little correlation between the size of an
> institution, the size of its sound recording collection, and the staff
> resources and budget dedicated to the collection's care or
> preservation.  I spoke with a few individuals in Seattle where there
> seemed no logical proportion, and have wondered since how widespread
> this may be.  If this is generally true, it's an analytical point well
> worth making in the study.
>
> Congressional staffers phoning analysts in the Congressional Research
> Service with a question are often told that they're asking the wrong
> question and it gets re-framed for them so the answer will be of some
> use.  So, feel free to re-frame my question and make of me a sauced
> gander. I can take it...will even welcome it.  Thanks for ploughing
> through this.
>
> Rob