While surfing for stories to post here, I discovered the “Internet Archive” site. What a treasure trove of history. The following article caught my attention, it was simply titled, “Saving the 78’s.”
My granddaughter, soon to be 9, only knows music comes out of her iPod and the satellite radio in the car. She doesn’t know from CD’s, much less cassette tapes. One of her grandmothers still had an 8-track player in the house – really.
I grew up listening to records, vinyl as it’s sometimes called. The records were in 3 formats. 78 RPM’s was the oldest, 33 1/3 RPM followed, and all the teens celebrated when 45’s were made. But I digress, here’s the article…oh, I was so intrigued I searched for video and found a 1946 spot about making the 78’s. It’s here too.
While audio CDs whiz by at about 500 revolutions per minute, the earliest flat disks offering music whirled at 78 rpm. They were mostly made from shellac, i.e., beetle (the bug, not The Beatles) resin and were the brittle predecessors to the LP (microgroove) era. The format is obsolete, and the surface noise is often unbearable and just picking them up can break your heart as they break apart in your hands. So why does the Internet Archive have more than 200,000 in our physical possession?
A little over a year ago New York’s ARChive of Contemporary Music (ARC) partnered with the Internet Archive to focus on preserving and digitizing audio-visual materials. ARC is the largest independent collection of popular music in the world. When we began in 1985 our mandate was microgroove recordings – meaning vinyl – LPs and forty-fives. CDs were pretty much rumors then, and we thought that other major institutions were doing a swell job of collecting earlier formats, mainly 78rpm discs. But donations and major research projects like making scans for The Grammy Museum and The Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame placed about 12,000 78s in our collection.
For years we had been getting calls offering 78 collections that we were unable to accept. But when space and shipping became available through the Internet Archive, it was now possible to begin preserving 78s. Here’s a short history of how in only a few years ARC and the Internet Archive have created one of the largest collections in America.
Our first major donation came from the Batavia Public Library in Illinois, part of the Barrie H.Thorp Collection of 48,000 78s.
[vc_btn title=”more on saving the 78’s” style=”outline” color=”primary” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fblog.archive.org%2F2016%2F09%2F02%2Fsaving-the-78s%2F|title:more%20on%20saving%20the%2078’s|target:%20_blank|”][vc_message message_box_style=”3d” message_box_color=”turquoise”]Written by B. George, the Director of ARChive of Contemporary Music in NYC, and Curator of Sound Collections at the Internet Archive in San Francisco excerpt posted on SouthFloridaReporter.com Sept. 30, 2016HISTORY OF VINYL RECORDS #1 – The 78 RPM Single. Manufacturing plant RCA, from YouTube/BJ’s RECORDS & NOSTALGIA [/vc_message]
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