Today marks the first anniversary of this blog’s first public post (well, in this hemisphere, anyway), so happy birthday to us! We’ve persevered through address changes, disappearing images, and other assorted backstage dramas, but we’re still here.

We look forward to bringing you another year of news mainly about the SAA Performing Arts Roundtable, as well as items related to performing arts archives and archivists (and those who love them). And the occasional unnecessary picture of a cat.

Image credit: Glass plate negative of Louis Wain’s ‘A Christmas catastrophe : please, sir, the rat entree has escaped and eaten the turkey.’ Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog #det1994023295/PP.

The all-new Spring/Summer 2008 issue of Performance!, the official newsletter of the SAA Performing Arts Roundtable, is now available. In addition to discussing the PAR business meeting and programs of interest at the upcoming SAA 2008 conference, this issue brings us articles from near and far (depending on how you look at things).

Doctoral candidate and fellowship holder, Kevin Kehrberg, reports on his research into Southern gospel music, mainly drawing on the collections of the Southern Appalachian Archives held by the Berea College Special Collections & Archives and the Center for Popular Music (at Middle Tennessee State University). Archive Officer and Cataloguer, Kristy Davis, details the efforts to enhance access to the fabled Mander & Mitchenson Theatre Collection.

As a reminder, you don’t have to be a member of the Society of American Archivists to receive the newsletter or to participate in the Performing Arts Roundtable and its discussion list. If you wish to receive future newsletters, go here to sign up either as a member (if you belong to SAA) or as a participant (non-SAA), though you may need to be a wizard (or the intimate friend of one) to make it all work.

Image credits:

(Top) Photo of the Four Tones, circa 1944. From Appalachian Music Fellowship 2007 page.

(Bottom) Stanley Jackson promotional poster for Cecil Lyle. From The Raymond Mander & Joe Mitchenson Theatre Collection Picture Gallery.

]]> http://ephemeralarchives.wordpress.com/2008/07/22/latest-issue-of-performance-is-out/feed/ elssler1 http://ephemeralarchives.wordpress.com/2008/07/20/yet-more-nypl-news/ http://ephemeralarchives.wordpress.com/2008/07/20/yet-more-nypl-news/#comments Sun, 20 Jul 2008 16:09:37 +0000 elssler1 http://ephemeralarchives.wordpress.com/?p=197

It seems that the New York Public Library has been in the news quite a lot of late. Directly concerning the Library for the Performing Arts is the recent announcement that Jan Schmidt has been appointed officially as the new curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division. Congratulations from Ephemeral Archives and all the best of luck!

Also sure to be of interest is the upcoming exhibition of the fabulous photographs of Kenn Duncan, which is scheduled to open in the LPA’s Donald and Mary Oenslager Gallery on 30 July. A small, but intriguing selection of images from the vast Kenn Duncan photograph archive already have been digitized for the NYPL Digital Gallery.

I opted for the portrait of Jerry Herman for two reasons. It seemed an apt moment to salute Mr. Herman, without whose music, current release, Wall-E, would be, well, two-dimensional. It also had been pointed out to me that somehow this blog has been singularly lacking in cat pictures to date–an omission we hope to continue to address in the coming months.

Image credit: Jerry Herman holding a cat. NYPL Digital Gallery ID #1752271

The “draft programme” for this year’s SIBMAS conference (unfortunately timed for those of us attending SAA) is now available. It sounds like a very impressive lineup and I know that many of us wish we could join them in Glasgow. But for now, we’ll just wish our friends good luck and eagerly anticipate the next SIBMAS conference to be held in a North American city (a joint venture with the Theatre Library Association). It’s now scheduled for 2012, so that should give you all plenty of time to clear your calendars.

Image credit: J.M. Barrie, from an original sketch in color by Ernest Haskell. NYPL Digital Image Gallery ID #1106781

I was only half awake when I heard this story on NPR’s ‘Morning Edition’ earlier today regarding the pending lawsuit between the estate of James Brown and stock photo concern, Corbis, but it does make for some entertaining reading (though the transcription has a few errors) or listening. Most interesting perhaps was to hear Corbis described as a “photo archive.” Do “archivists” think of it as being what we traditionally view as archives in the public sense? Isn’t Corbis just another shop? Albeit a very well-stocked one. On its corporate Web site, Corbis describes itself as a “creative resource.”

Be that as it may, the story also reminded me about another blog post that I had started here several months ago, but aborted mainly because it occurred at around the same time that problems first began with the media uploading platform on WordPress (an issue hopefully resolved for good now) and I was unable to insert the above image of an early performance of James Brown and the Flames (hopefully neither the Library of Congress nor the estate of James Brown will mind me doing so now).

Way back in April there were various reports in the media that an exhibition of the late singer’s memorabilia was being planned by the I. P. Stanback Museum and Planetarium at South Carolina State University. At that time it had been announced that the show would open at some point during the summer, so I decided to check back on its progress. This time around, I discovered the museum’s own blog, which indicates that the exhibit will open in October 2008 (to coincide with SCSU’s homecoming week). Something else to add to your calendars!

Image credit: James Brown and the Flames during live performance, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, Digital ID (b&w film copy neg.) cph 3c21427 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c21427

Although the memories of Anaheim are rapidly receding from my memory, I did want to mention that the American Library Association Annual Conference offered a number of meetings and programs that probably would have been of great interest to archivists who deal with performing arts collections. Naturally I couldn’t manage to attend all of them, but one that I did take in which is worth noting was a session sponsored by the ALA Public Information Office entitled, Baseball’s Greatest Hit: The Story of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” The program featured a fast-paced, yet deeply personal, multimedia presentation by Andy Strasberg, one of the co-authors of the recent book of the same name.

Also opening this Friday is a related exhibition, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”: 100 Years of Music, Musicians, and the National Pastime at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The show promises to draw heavily on materials from the NYPL’s Music Division and other departments, but it also will feature items from Stamberg’s own extensive personal collection. Hopefully one of our New York friends will be able to provide us with a firsthand account.

In the meantime, the rest of us can lobby TCM to broadcast Shine on Harvest Moon (1944), the Warner Brothers biopic about the relationship of Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth (the lyricist of the song). I must have seen this film on television during my misspent and invalid-ish childhood, but I really only remember Dennis Morgan being Chauncey Olcott.

Image credit: White Studio key sheet of images of Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth. NYPL Digital Gallery Image ID # wwm9911_w95f0_27237

Well, you get the idea. Have a happy holiday!

With catch phrases like “repurposing content” and “harvesting our metadata” still rattling their way across my synapses this morning, I began to wonder if there was anything I could reuse in a blog post from one of the myriad of more “official” accounts of the RBMS Preconference that I had been trying to crank out earlier. Probably not.

The usual mix of workshops, plenaries, seminars, and social events (some planned, some improvised), the event did not appear to offer all that much that would be of direct or particular interest to performing arts archivists (although much of what was discussed obviously will have a great impact on those archivists working in research libraries). Indeed, with so many archivists lurking in the wings and even seizing center stage, the conference had a kind of strange vibe. Certainly nothing quite compares to the experience of being exhorted by various library administrators to “get over ourselves” and “get on with it” (although maybe they weren’t talking to me–I’m never sure). For a fair minded representation of the goings on at RBMS you might do well to check out Hanging Together, the lovely blog brought to you by the good peeps at RLG.

Speaking of blogs, much of the conference buzz appeared to center around the SRO RBMS Blog Boot Camp seminar, which has its own blog. Aside from the profession’s unfortunate penchant for earthy terms like “boot camp” and “toolkit” (I would have preferred blogging barre), the session was surprisingly energizing and quaint all at the same time. Even the venerable Terry Belanger seemingly was moved to pronounce this apparent breakdown of previously rigid hierarchies to be a good thing–a moment not captured for YouTube, I believe, but some of the seminar participants already have been blogging about it. Maybe someone else took down the exact quote.

Image credit: 20th Century Limited cigarette card; NYPL Digital Image ID #1561478

Today’s New York Times reports on the acquisition of the Savada Collection by the Syracuse University Library’s Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive. This enormous and important collection, which was compiled by the late Morton J. Savada (former owner of the Records Revisited store in New York City), contains over 200,000 thousand rare 78-rpm recordings of popular music, as well as related printed materials. A more official press release with fuller details regarding this excellent resource (and its future availability to the public) can be found on the SUL Web site.

I scarcely had time to begin musing about what criteria may make a new archival acquisition “newsworthy” enough to rate a mention in the Times when I (suddenly) recalled one of the more curious comments I overheard at the recent ALA conference. At a discussion group meeting someone remarked that her institution had “dodged a bullet” by not having acquired the Grateful Dead Archive, indicating that it had gone instead to the University of California, Santa Cruz Library’s Special Collections and Archives. Leaving aside, for the time being, the entire question of the kind of attitude that comment reveals, I wondered inwardly, “Why didn’t I hear about it? Has it happened already? Was it in the Times?”

Well, yes, Virginia, it turns out that the NYT did run a story way back in late April (!) when the announcement of the new acquisition was first made. But it was included in the U.S. news section, which, sad to say, I rarely find the time to read these days when all the news I supposedly am interested in, “comes to me” directly via RSS feeds from the Arts section. There also was a very nice piece that came out in the San Francisco Chronicle at around the same time. So, belated props to UCSC for so cheerfully taking on the very special challenges of this unique gift. They’ve even recently started up their own blog about it.

Image credits:

(Top) Photo of Morton J. Savada in 1988 by Elias Savada. From New York Times obituary.

(Bottom) UCSC press conference photo by r.r. jones; Pictured (l-r): Nion McEvoy, Virginia Steel, George Blumenthal, Bob Weir, and Mickey Hart. From UCSC News.

]]> http://ephemeralarchives.wordpress.com/2008/07/02/more-acquisitions-new-and-newish-and-limitations-of-rss-feeds/feed/ elssler1 http://ephemeralarchives.wordpress.com/2008/07/01/blogging-resumes/ http://ephemeralarchives.wordpress.com/2008/07/01/blogging-resumes/#comments Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:47:35 +0000 elssler1 http://ephemeralarchives.wordpress.com/?p=173

Or perhaps that should be blogging shall resume. We have just returned from over a week’s worth of conference-going and still need to catch up on a variety of things. Just a quick and timely reminder, however, that the early bird registration deadline for the SAA 2008 Annual Meeting of 7 July 2008 is fast approaching. SAA also has reported that rooms are now available at a special rate at the historic Mark Hopkins Hotel–a longish walk (or roll) down the hill to the main conference site, but it may be worth it.

Image credit: Circulation Managers Banquet at the Peacock Court, Mark Hopkins Hotel (June 16, 1942) from California Faces: Selections from The Bancroft Library Portrait Collection. Warren, Earl, 1891-1974. Group 8