These recordings have never been circulated and were in storage for several decades, uncatalogued and inaccessible to the public.
How and why did the library acquire hundreds of thousands of recordings it evidently did not intend to use? There must be a story here.
From the library's web site, it will be up to an organization called Internet Archive to receive, catalogue, and digitie the recordings and then make them available. The Boston library will merely dump its holdings on the Internet Archive, whose scanning and digitizing facilities are in the Philippines, and wash their hands of it all. Besides digitizing the audio, the Internet Archive will have to cagalogue it all, an essential and formidable task that I suspect will be done only superficially by copying information from the record labels and jackets. I just hope they don't botch it; without a proper catalogue these recordings will be as useless as they have been while stored at the library.
I had never heard of Internet Archive but after reading the Wikipedia Article I see that it is an immense and incredibly ambitious project cnsisting mainly of Internet archives and printed matter but also of some 200,000 audio recordings, which the Boston donation will more than double. There are even larger audio archives than Boston's, at the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library, but these process and house their collections as the Boston library has not.
Now that I know about Internet Archive I clearly need to learn how to use it, not so much for recordings as for books and such. Any CMG members who know about this, what do you think?
