By Stacya Shepard Silverman

Growing up, my father worked night and day on a massive project which he called The Encyclopedia of Folk Music. Dad’s desk was in the middle of whatever small place we rented, if indeed rent was ever paid. His desk was the center of our household universe, piled high with papers, a Corona typewriter, stacks of reference books and sheet music, his ashtray over-flowing with cigar butts.

As a kid, I believed The Encyclopedia was going to make Dad famous, and he told me we’d have loads of money when it was published. He said he was listing thousands of folk songs in detailed entries. There would be nothing like it, or so I was told; the most complete collection of folk songs in existence, and he was the person to put it all together, having been a singer and songwriter back in the day, long before I was born in 1965.

Because my father couldn’t read music, a musician named Joe Tansman spent countless hours creating sheet music for Dad, he was at our house so often he became family. Unfortunately, Joe was never given attribution for his work, as far as I can tell.

Several years into the project, things went haywire. My mother said Dad sold The Encyclopedia to Billboard Magazine, but he couldn’t bring himself to give them the work. He kept the advance, using the money to rush us out of town.

When I was twelve, a man called the house calling my father a crook, and said he’d invested his life savings and wanted to be paid. That same year, more bad news: Dad said somehow his index for The Encyclopedia had been mysteriously burned and he’d have to start again, although there was no fire in or around our house. There was always a wacky reason why The Encyclopedia wouldn’t be published anytime soon.

Fast forward: I’m an adult trying to piece it together. My father died in 2009, and his encyclopedia isn’t with the rest of his papers. I began looking into things I was told, songs he said he wrote and his many pseudonyms. Recently I tracked down an older copy of The Encyclopedia a couple had invested in back in 1970. I knew by this time the work would never be published. I loved my dad and we were close, but I became obsessed with fact checking him, which started while he was still alive, and continues to this day.

Last summer, I pitched this complex story to NPR’s “Hidden Brain” podcast, and an episode was created based on decades of my research. They interviewed my contacts including a half-sister I met in 2011 (one of many children my father had abandoned). While “Hidden Brain” was in production, I purchased the 1970s copy of The Encyclopedia which became part of the story the show crafted.

Being featured on a popular podcast gave me a lucky break, I was contacted by Internet Archive. David Fox, Development Director, and Jeff Kaplan, Collections Manager had heard the show, and Jeff reached out to me, wondering if I’d be interested in having the work scanned. Brewster Kahle, the founder, approved the pro bono scanning of the work.

On my 54th birthday, 10 years after my father’s death, I took my copy of The Encyclopedia to Internet Archives and gave it to Jeff and Brewster. It’s hard to put into words the closure this gave me, knowing that at least after all the twists, turns and broken promises, Dad’s early copy will be online for people to use at no cost. I was told by Jeff Kaplan that he’d already found an obscure song in The Encyclopedia and performed it with his duo. I wish I could have been there to hear it!

There’s the last version of The Encyclopedia, which has mysteriously vanished. The boxes full of my father’s work were supposed to go to The Buck Owens Museum, but may have ended up in some unknown person’s storage. I’ve yet to track it down. That missing copy has more entries, and would take months to scan. But for now, I’m going to pause to enjoy the memory of my best birthday ever. Thank you to Internet Archive and all the wonderful people who made this happen.

On October 27, 2018 The Internet Archive presented The Basic Bye-bye Show by the Bread and Puppet Theater. 

The Basic Bye-bye Show is a series of quiet object fantasies in black, white, and grey inside a small fabric stage printed with elementary words — “Resist,” “Bread,” “Yes,” “Sky,” “Riot,” “Byebye.”

Bread & Puppet’s director, Peter Schumann, says of the show: “The Basic Bye-bye Show is based on the fact that our culture is saying its basic bye-bye to Mother Earth by continuing the devastating effects of the global economy on our planet.”

Bread and Puppet Theater was founded in 1963 by Peter Schumann on New York City’s Lower East Side. Their traveling puppet shows range from tightly composed theater pieces, to extensive outdoor pageants which require the participation of many volunteers. The Bread and Puppet Theater is one of the oldest, nonprofit, self-supporting theatrical companies in the country.

The Music Modernization Act is now US law and the final version of this bill, which seeks to fix a wide range of problems in music copyright law, is not perfect, but it’s better than the version we opposed a few months ago.

One portion of the MMA makes older sound recordings published before 1972 more available to the public. It expands an obscure provision of the library exception to US Copyright Law, Section 108(h), to apply to all pre-72 recordings. Unfortunately 108(h) is notoriously hard to implement. But, as we understand it, the MMA means that libraries can make some of these older recordings freely available to the public as long as we do a reasonable search to determine that they are not commercially available.

We took a look through our collections and found some vinyl rarities. Hopefully more to come. Enjoy!

There are over 50k uploaded recordings from 78’s from users, and there are now 10’s of thousands of high-bitrate unrestored transfers of 78’s that are part of the Great 78 Project.

With this many, it gets hard to find things you want to explore.  Here are some techniques I do:

• Twitter feed of newly digitized 78’s is fun and addictive: one every 10 minutes. Addictive.
• Find a collection or Search on Archive.org and the hit the “play items” link in the upper right and it plays and plays.  I use this for dinner music all the time.
• Find a 78 I like on archive.org and then go to bottom and hit “play items” above the related items gallery and this also plays and plays.
• To list the high bitrate transfers, most recently uploaded first
• Find those that say “Blues” in the metadata, “ragtime”, “yodel or yodelling”
• Find those that have been reviewed recently
• Find those on the Paramount label.
• Find those that are in very good or near mint condition
• Find Victor recordings 1903-13 (but beware because ½ of our recordings have no dates)

Again, I recommend the “play items” link as it plays along like youtube does.

To download for research and preservation purposes:

• Download right hand side of a “details” page, and you can click to see the whole list of files.
• There is the “best” stylus version (according to an audio engineer at George Blood Co) that is renamed to be itune-ish compatible, but all the stylii recordings are there in flat and equalized formats, and each of those in FLAC and MP3 formats.

To download many records for research and preservation purposes (requires linux or mac and command line skills):

• Install the Internet Archive command line interface
• To download metadata in json from our 78 transfers, in bash:
  • for item in `./ia search “collection:georgeblood” –itemlist`; do curl -Ls https://archive.org/metadata/$item/metadata ; echo “”; done
  • I installed gnu parallel to speed things up (I use “brew install parallel” on a mac)
  • ./ia search “collection:georgeblood” –itemlist | parallel -j10 ‘curl -Ls https://archive.org/metadata/{}/metadata’ > 78s.json
• To download all of files of the high bitrate transfers (and is repeatable to update based on failures or new additions):
  • ./ia download –search=”collection:georgeblood”      (14TB at this point)
• To download only the metadata and Flac’s:
  • ./ia download 78_–and-mimi_frankie-carle-and-his-orchestra-gregg-lawrence-kennedy-simon_gbia0006176a –format=”24bit Flac” –format=”Metadata”
• To download only the metadata and mp3’’s of all ragtime recordings:
  • ./ia download –search=”collection:georgeblood AND ragtime” –format=”VBR MP3″ –format=”Metadata”

If you want to do more on downloading specific sets, I suggest the documentation or joining the slack channel.

How You can Help: Please help find dates for these 78’s

We are doing some by automatically matching against 78discography.com and discogs.com, but many are done by hand, finding entries in billboard magazine and on DAHR the like.  But many still need dates.

If you would like to help, then please do research and post your findings in the review of a 78rpm record, citing your sources.  Then someone with privileges will change the metadata in the item.

The complete collection has date facets on the left reflecting the dates we have found.  But we only have dates for about half, and there are thousands of 78rpm sides posted each month so we need help!

To find what others have done, you can list them in the order of the most recent reviews.

The most recent ones that do not have a date nor a review are here.  This is a good starting place.

But again, these need dates.  If you tried and could not find anything online, then please post a review to that effect so others do not spend time on the same one.   

If you find other information, or know other information about the performer, performance, or piece, please put it in.  Also links to youtube, wikipedia, and old magazines like cashbox and billboard.  

For those that get into it, we invite you to join the slack channel (a great tool if you have not used it already), then that is where there is some discussion.   Caitlin@archive.org can set you up.

Oh, and I have gotten a bit obsessed, and this is a twitter feed of a digital transfer every 10 minutes which I visit more times than I should probably.

Restoration techniques:

• Jessica Thompson worked with this collection and wrote a paper and presented at ARSC on it.
• A recommendation for restoring a 78 from raw formats, like what we have on archive.org, by George Brock-Nannestad <pattac@IMAGE.DK>  said he liked “ClickRepair suite of software from Australia” in a post to ARSC
• Another approach for restoring a 78: posted to ARSC by Mickey Clark <mclark@SHAWBIZ.CA> of http://mcproductions.shawbiz.ca/ :

I have been using Dartpro MT – I like it because it has a “Filter builder” –
the program doesn’t like 24 bit but I transfer at 24/96,000 , resample to
16/96000 then decrackle starting with a setting of 50 repeating the process
with an increase each time by another 10 i.e. 50, 60, 70, 80 (maximum) if
more noise is still there, I run repeatedly at 80 until the reported
interventions get to a number of 4000 or so. I can then manually remove any
clicks that are left.

I don’t use the denoise or dehiss, preferring to use declick  at very low
settings (78’s don’t have hiss – what you hear as hiss is the combination of
many little clicks.

I start with a setting of 2 then 4 then 6 . I leave the settings the same
then just find whether 1 or 2 or 3 passes will polish the higher noise away.
Decrackle doesn’t affect the high frequencies but declick does. This process
takes a little time but I almost never find that any distortion is
introduced to the sound.  I hate getting to the end of the record where the
really growly trumpet sound is a distorted mess, and this workflow prevents
that. – Mickey Clark

• Corey Bailey Audio Engineering www.baileyzone.net in the context of these 78s:

My “go to” software for restoration work is Izotope. However, I also have Adobe Audition, Diamond Cut, Pro Tools, Samplitude, and Sound Forge available for specific situations. As Ted Kendall points out: Hearing and Judgment play the major roles in both transfer and restoration. To that I would add Experience. And, as always, start with the best possible source.

Get Involved

Please write to the Internet Archive’s music curator  bgeorge@archive.org or more generally to info@archive.org .

Please join this project to:

• Share knowledge. Help improve the metadata, curate the collection, contact collectors, do research on the corpus, etc.
• Include your digitized collection. If you have already digitized 78s or related books or media, we’d like to include your work in the collection.
• Digitize your collection.  We’ve worked hard to make digitization safe, fast and affordable, so if you’d like to digitize your collection we can help.
• Donate 78s.  We have 200,000 78s, but we are always looking for more.  We will digitize your collection and preserve the physical discs for the long term.

If you are in the bay area of California, we can also use help in packing 78’s for digitization and please come over for a lunch on a Friday.

Europeana Radio marks the beginning of easy and interactive access to Europe’s sound treasures, where listeners are free to browse, listen and tag. The player contains over 200.000 historic music tracks collected from sound archives across twelve European countries, including content from the Internet Archive. Europeana Radio is launched by Europeana Sounds and Europeana Foundation.

Interactive radioplayer
Users can browse a wide range of sound recordings (Classical Music, Folk and Traditional Music and Popular Music), play them on random mode, and tag the tracks with musical genres. The tagging feature of Europeana Radio means that all users, from casual listeners to historians and academics, can become archivists by tagging the musical genres of the recordings whilst listening to them. This ultimately improves the discoverability of these tracks within the Europeana Music Collection and provides a better experience of the recordings.

Improving access
Europeana Radio builds on three years of work aggregating audio content from cultural institutions across Europe, improving their access by enriching descriptions and developing themed sound channels, led by the Europeana Sounds project. As a result more than one million recordings, previously sitting hidden in individual institutions and only available to their respective audiences, are now available on Europeana. The musical archives and Europeana Radio are gathered under a special thematic portal Europeana Music.

Curious? Listen to Europeana Radio and discover Europe’s musical heritage yourself! Will you be able to identify the genres?

The 10th annual screening of Lost Landscapes, Rick Prelinger’s archival tour of San Francisco’s past (and anticipation of its future) happens again at the Internet Archive on Thursday, December 10.  Your ticket donations will benefit the Internet Archive, the non-profit digital library that hosts the Prelinger Collection. Please give generously to support our mission:  providing universal access to our cultural treasures, including these cinematic gems.

Thursday, December 10, 2015
6:30 pm Reception
7:30 pm Interactive Film Program

Internet Archive
300 Funston Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94118

Get tickets here!

Combining past favorites with new cinematic discoveries, this feature-length program shows San Francisco’s neighborhoods, landmarks, celebrations and people from 1906 through the 1970s. New sequences this year include 1930s downtown tavern scenes, New Deal labor graphics and an exuberant 1940s Labor Day parade, radical longshore workers, newly discovered World War II-era tourist-shot Kodachrome film, residential neighborhood activities and much more.

As usual, the audience creates the soundtrack — audience members are asked to identify places and events, ask questions, share their thoughts, and create an unruly interactive symphony of speculation about the city we’ve lost and the city we’d like to live in.

The film begins at 7:30 pm and is preceded by an informal reception that begins at 6:30 pm. Light concessions will be available for purchase. Although capacity is limited, no one will be turned away due to lack of funds.