What Can Syracuse Do with 200,000 78 rpm Records?

(by Craig Meyer, craig@reclaimmedia.com) (All Articles)

The Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive at Syracuse University was just given over 200,000 10-inch 78 rpm records, the remaining stock of now-closed Records Revisited in Manhattan. These records span the first half-century of American music including swing, country, blues, gospel, polka, folk and Broadway, as well as the special shellac-free V-disc recordings mass-distributed to Allied soldiers during World War II.

The gift leaves Syracuse with the second-largest collection of 78 rpm records in the whole world, second only to the Library of Congress. It encompasses a remarkably wide slice of our cultural memory.

But what can they actually do with it? How can this collection be made discoverable and meaningful to the outside world, outside a college campus in upstate New York?

Reclaim Media can help. This is our proposal for transferring these records into a digital audio database that can be quickly and affordably catalogued, commented, searched, heard and appreciated across the world.

We would like to set up and staff a temporary digitization facility at Syracuse, preferably right in the Belfer building. It will use the same scalable digitization technology that we have developed for our central transfer facility in Seattle, Washington.

There, we will take a 96,000 sample/second 24-bit recording of every record, thus satisfying the fidelity standard recommended and used by the Library of Congress. They will be encoded as FLAC files, a lossless compressed digital audio format. FLAC is a non-proprietary open-source standard, free from the whims or fortunes of any single company or organization. Whatever happens down the road, FLAC files will be decodable and playable.

An interesting complication with 78 rpm records is that they were recorded under a variety of pre-amp filter standards, unlike 33 rpm and 45 rpm records. One can sometimes determine which filter is best from the record's publisher and year or production year, but sometimes not. This means that the original "raw" 96,000 sample/second 24-bit recording must then be auditioned through the variety of different pre-amp filters in order to find the one that sounds best. The good news is that this can happen entirely through a web interface without access to the physical record. The various pre-amp filters can be effected digitally with no loss of fidelity and the best-sounding choice logged in a database for application on-demand later. This way, the best filter choice can even be changed later without incident. The original and unfiltered "raw" recording remains, from which a new correct-sounding version can be derived at any time.

This isn't just about audio, however! For each record, we will also take fine-print-legible multi-megapixel photographs of every physical surface like the record itself, its packaging and all included notes and booklets.

This way, every possible aspect of the record will be digitally captured. The physical records are now secondary and can go into deep storage or even resold to recover costs. Only Reclaim Media has the computer-controlled digitization and camera-control technology to deliver such inclusive data quality for less than $20 per record.

Metadata from the printed surfaces must still be transcribed and catalogued before the digital audio will be useful. The key advantage to our approach, then, is that all such follow-up librarianship can take place over a web interface. Access to the actual records is no longer required. Whether by graduate students, off-site data-entry professionals and/or volunteer music enthusiasts, transcription and cataloguing can now happen through the same web-based workflow, fully apart from the physical records themselves.

Making the now-digitized records available to the world in this way via a web interface and streaming audio is the best way to make the collection accessible and meaningful. This way, the collection can be shared with other institutions around the world as well as music-loving individuals.

Furthermore, it could very well become the de-facto academic music database, like Google for searching or Craigslist for classified ads. Other institutions will need to port their collections into it as well so that their own recordings will be as accessible, both internally and to the outside world, as Syracuse's. This could snowball into something much larger than the original 200,000 78 rpm records' worth of audio. It could put Syracuse at the global center of musical scholarship.

Back to article library.