I was thinking the same thing.
If I were project manager of ingesting this massive collection, the
first thing I would do is assign a team of research interns to
separate every title that is available as in-print CD's. I would
estimate, given the massive reduction of jazz catalogs in recent
years, this might cover 1/4 to 1/3 of the collection. Next, I would
separate titles that were out on CD at one time but are now out of
print but the CD can be purchased used or new-old-stock for a
reasonable price (ie less than the cost of transfer and archiving).
This might then cover another 1/3 or the collection, so anywhere from
1/3 to just under 1/2 will probably have never been released as CD's
and thus will require transfer.
I base these estimates simply on my own jazz LP collection, which is
much smaller. A surprisingly large number of titles never made it to
CD. However, some or all of the songs on those titles may have made it
to various collections. I am assuming the intent of the digitization
would be to preserve the original album sequences. If one were to hunt
song-by-song to compile albums, it gets expensive and one often ends
up with half or less of an album.
By the way, for the librarians on this list, you should take an
afternoon some time and see how many of your circulating CD's are
easily replaced. You might be horrified to find that many of them are
out of print, especially if you have a large classical or jazz
collection in circulation. This is also the case with audiobooks that
aren't best-sellers -- generally there is a small production run of a
title and a replacement copy is an expensive one-off duplicated by the
publisher. As I understand fair-use, a library is within its rights to
circulate a duplicate as long as they own and keep the original CD. I
believe someone linked to a Stanford-based report on fair-use that
detailed this a while back. I borrow a lot of classical CD's from the
local library system because I like to listen to music during the
office days. I'm often disappointed to get unplayable damaged discs,
and then random checks often indicate the disc is out of print and
some or all of its contents is not included in the more recent
reissie/re-combination/re-themed collection.
-- Tom Fine
----- Original Message ----- From: "Matthew Snyder" <msnyder@xxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2007 9:17 AM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] 100K+ Jazz records going to Oberlin
>its complete recorded contents will be transferred to digital
files.
Oberlin is going to digitize thousands of albums which may already be
commercially available in digital form? That can't possibly be the case.
Matt Snyder
Music Archivist
Wilson Processing Project
The New York Public Library