WOW! What a wonderful gift to the archive community! A HUGE THANK YOU to all involved. It took me years to obtain a copy of WERM, and now a computer searchable copy at my fingertips. A note, and a question: At first, I thought something wrong with my downloads - but there are a number of BLANK pages at the start of each document. How do you search all 3 WERM volumes at once? THANKS! Best wishes, Thomas.
-----Original Message----- From: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List [mailto:ARSCLIST@xxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Steve Abrams Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 2009 9:16 PM To: ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [ARSCLIST] Download a W.E.R.M.
The World's Encyclopaedia of Recorded Music (WERM), an heroic endeavour by
F. F. Clough and G. J. Cuming published in 1951, "aimed at the inclusion of
every record of permanent music issued since the advent of electrical
recording up to April, 1950, throughout the world". Three Supplements
covered the period up to the end of 1955.
The whole of the W.E.R.M. has been scanned and put online by CHARM, the
Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music, and is available for
free download in PDF format from their site:
http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/discography/disco_resources.html
Their PDF of the 1951 WERM is a huge, 357 MB, unsearchable image scan. Mr.
Joseph Serraglio has converted it to a searchable format, downsampled it to
reduce file size by 60%, and uploaded it to Rapidshare.
http://rapidshare.com/files/242040824/WERM_1951_-searchable-optimized.pdf (148 MB)
This volume, pp. 912 including the first supplement, was posted to a private
list, but Mr. Serraglio has given me permission to pass the link to
ARSCLIST.
The scans of the second and third supplements on Charm are similarly bloated
and also unsearchable. However, Mr. Serraglio has drawn my attention to
the fact that compact searchable PDF scans of these two volumes, 294 and 599
pages respectively, are available from the Internet Archive, courtesy of
Microsoft:
http://www.archive.org/details/secondsupplement010477mbp (33 MB)
http://www.archive.org/details/thirdsupplement1007508mbp (82 MB)
If you keep all three files in a single folder you can search all of them at
once.
Finally, the Gramophone Shop Encyclopaedias of 1936 and 1942 are also available in PDF from the Internet Archive:
http://www.archive.org/details/gramophoneshopen010034mbp (1936 edition - 68 MB)
http://www.archive.org/details/gramophoneshopen007344mbp (1942 edition - 60 MB)
Steve Abrams