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Re: [ARSCLIST] Libraries disposing of records
Courtney,
Well, if we need to keep prog and disco around to explain punk, then I
guess you're right. I'm a punk fan too. It's amazing what you can
accomplish with 4 chords and a bunch of guys who can't play their
instruments all that well.
Libraries and institutions should all specialize in something so they
can do it well. If you are a jack of every genre, can you give anything
enough time to do it justice? I'm not talking about personal
collections. I'm speaking of libraries and institutions. There should
be a list of libraries, and what their collections consist of, so that
if a library gets a tasty rare bluegrass side (or other), and they
specialize in the complete /Pablo Cruise/ or /Tony Orlando and Dawn/,
they can send that Ralph Stanly acetate to someone who'll preserve and
archive the material. That's just to hold the original specimen.
After it has been restored/preserved, the recording should be available
on the internet to other libraries. I'm not an advocate of making all
recordings available to the public through the internet for many
reasons, and I AM a member of the public. I like the idea of making
someone go the library for access. I have multiple reasons for that
opinion. Even though libraries are funded by tax dollars, they aren't
funded like Kellogg, Brown and Root.
Phillip
Miss Q wrote:
LOL well, i'm holding out for a record collector (male) who might
understand
the cultural connotation of boy band appreciation. Of course, gender
identity is a whole other aspect of the commercial pop field amongst many
people...another reason to preserve even the "crap" (my parentheses)
because
it may have significant value to understanding a particular paradigm
(ie I
really wouldn't want to listen to disco unless it had an influence on a
later band/culture I wanted to know more about.)
I guess this boils down to divorcing the music as personal collectors and
fans to preserving the music as cultural anthropologists. There needs
to be
the supercollector/superfan to archive the material, and what may not be
"needed" immediately, or even in a decade or two, may be needed
generations
away. We are living in an incredible time when the cost of digitally
archiving material is very accessible. I ackowledge the concerns about
longevity and quality of digital media, however, even if the
superfan/collector can network and let people know their collection is
available we are at an incredible time to NOT LOSE STUFF.
That sums it up. I love that this list is archived by the LOC. If someone
twenty years from now needs mid-nineties queer punk bootlegs, I've got
em. I
know they should be in a vault, but is it worth it yet?
The look on the teen girl's face when I handed her a ten year old punk
band
bootleg was worth it. I'm dealing with issues of copyright whey I do
that,
but as a (soon to be) librarian I want people to access the
information they
need. I don't take it for granted that people in cities have more access
than people in rural areas to this material. It pains me to weed
anything at
the library, but it is my greatest happiness is to disseminate
information/media that people might not otherwise have access to. I think
all librarians are really working from their heart when they cull their
collections. Sometimes it will fall back on the
collector/researcher/archivist to complete the story, but the history
of the
world has been told in incomplete records. We're still here.