This Donation Sounds Great

 

William Vanden Dries of the Audio Preservation Fund and Fine Arts Music Library David Hunter. Photo by Emilia Harris, Daily Texan Staff

An unexpected gift can sometimes be the most invaluable.

Thanks to a generous donation from the Audio Preservation Fund – an Austin-based nonprofit formed by three UT alumni in 2009 – the already extensive Historic Musical Recordings Collection (HMRC) just got a little more so with the addition of 1,000 vinyl albums.

Chairman of the Audio Preservation Fund William Vanden Dries hand-delivered the eclectic mix of recordings to the Collections Deposit Library on Tuesday. After an extensive review of the HMRC’s holdings, the group determined where their reserves might bridge gaps in the collection’s catalog, and the gift was amassed from the cache of an unnamed individual collector.

The Audio Preservation Fund acts as a facilitator for the collection and preservation of sound recordings, and for the distribution of donated items to suitable recipients including public archives, libraries, museums, universities and research centers. The Fund’s goal is to make private collections available to the public in an effort to improve access to rare, unique and historical audio.

We express our gratitude to the Audio Preservation Fund on behalf of the Libraries and the patrons who will benefit from their generous gift.

 

On Litigating Fair Use

From Duke University Libraries:

When the Association of Research Libraries wrote a letter to the CCC expressing disappointment over the decision to help underwrite the lawsuit, CCC’s reply emphasized that no damages were being sought and maintained that their participation had the simple goal of “clarifying” fair use. This strikes me as disingenuous. There are more efficient ways to clarify fair use than litigation, and the CCC has a definite financial interest in the case even absent any request for damages. CCC’s aim here is not to clarify fair use but to narrow it dramatically, to their direct and immediate profit.

The argument developed here by Kevin Smith places the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) in a harsh light – subvening copyright violation litigation in order to further restrict access options to intellectual property, thus securing its own role in the publishing community while attempting to prop up that foundering industry a little longer.  As Paul Courant observes elsewhere (and thanks to Paul for the pointer to this article) it forces a reluctant higher education community to seek alternatives to its own and commercial presses – an outcome potentially fatal to the industry.

The Future Predicted in 1936

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I think Binkley could be on to something….

“The present generation should not be surprised at the conclusion of a technological revolution that has as its seed [sic] of a cultural revolution. Such may indeed be true in this instance. The cultural revival of the monopoly of the metropolis and the democratization and deprofessionalization of scholarship are on the horizon which seems to lie ahead. And these things themselves accord with other elements of our social and economic prospects, notably the possible decline in the centralization of population in cities and the development of a new leisure in the hands of a well-educated people. The same technical innovations that promise to give aid to the research worker in his cubicle may also lead the whole population toward participation in a new cultural design.”

The Libraries have two copies of his Manual on methods of reproducing research materials, both available for recall from the Library Storage Facility.

(via boingboing.net)