Yale Historical Sound Recordings Awarded Major Grant for "Song, Speech, and Dance"

The Yale University Library, in partnership with Stanford University Library, has received a $457,776 grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) for Song, Speech and Dance: Special Collections from the Recorded Sound Archives at Yale and Stanford Universities.  The CLIR grant award to Yale and Stanford is part of its "Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives" program, and was one of only 14 grants given nationally from a pool of over 90 submissions.

The 18-month project began in December 2009, and will create catalog records and finding aids for more than 1,100 linear feet of rare audio and paper archival materials from the 1950s to the 1980s, drawn from the Historical Sound Recordings (HSR) collection at Yale and the Archive of Recorded Sound (ARS) at Stanford.  The catalog records will be added to WorldCat, the premier online catalog, and to the online library catalogs at Yale and Stanford, and  by doing so, will bring greater notice to the unique holdings of audio and archival materials in these respective institutions.

Objectives
Under the direction of Principal Investigator Kendall Crilly, Associate University Librarian, the project staff will catalog a diverse range of rare and historically significant materials that include at Yale, the Stanley and Helen Oakely Dance collection of taped interviews with major jazz figures; the complete business records of Overtone Records and the Spoken Arts Record Company, important post-war producers of literary and musical recordings; materials relating to early opera singers, including Enrico Caruso, Adelina Patti, and Geraldine Farrar; collections of test pressing of recording by Vladimir Horowitz; and audiotapes of historical events, guest speakers, and concerts on the Yale campus.

The collections at Stanford include recordings and archives from the Ambassador Auditorium Performing Arts Series in Pasadena, California, sometimes referred to as the "Carnegie Hall of the West," which hosted concerts by Luciano Pavarotti, Arthur Rubenstein, the Vienna Philharmonic, Frank Sinatra, and many others. The Stanford collections also include recorded performances by internationally known opera singer Lawrence Tibbett, and test pressings and instantaneous recordings of virtuoso violinists Yehudi Menuhin and Jascha Heifitz.

Challenges
The Yale-Stanford cataloging project will, at times, be particularly challenging.  Determining the contents of various recordings for which identifications are minimal or incomplete is difficult.  Many of the recordings have only brief handwritten contents notes on the boxes or sleeves, some of which have faded to the point where they are almost illegible. Playing the recordings will be one way to expedite the cataloging process.  Relying on scarce accompanying documentation such as concert programs, will be another.  The fragility of some of the recordings may make preliminary preservation work necessary.  The project staff hope that over time, scholars whose access to the Yale and Stanford collections will be facilitated through the critical project cataloging, will help fill in the information gap as part of their own research.

Rewards
Such scholarly work will build on much already accomplished.  Researchers have already published works of great scholarly importance based on the archival materials in Historical Sound Recordings at Yale and the Archive of Recorded Sound at Stanford.  The project staff hope as well that "Song, Speech, and Dance," with the generous support of the Council on Library and Information Resources, will serve as a catalyst and a model for further work of this kind for cataloging the rest of their archival collections, both current and those that may arrive in the future.

^{(Images:  Carte-de-visite for opera singer Adelina Patti; album cover for spoken word recording, Spoken Arts Record Company.  Historical Sound Recordings, Yale University Library)}