Stan and I have a large collection of vinyl. We didn’t give it up once it wasn’t fashionable any longer and now have a collection of hundreds of our favorite bands from the 70’s, 80’s, and early 90’s waiting for us. We just started to pull that portion of our music collection over to the digital realm. Last year I bought Stan and tabletop record digitization system. It is immensely rewarding to hear those albums, both sides, and relive those eras once again.

That’s one  reason I’m so happy to see the Boston Public Library, among others, via the Internet Archive, digitizing their vinyl collections. It warms my heart to know that people will be able to hear music as it was during those decades. As a curator, I know we won’t be able to save everything, but knowing that some of the recordings on vinyl are being catalogued and digitally preserved, in large numbers, makes me feels great about being human and helping humans beings remember who they were in previous periods.

Please visit the project below. Many of the albums are covered by copyright, so you can only hear a sample online, but quite a few things are beyond copyright and can be heard in all their glory. The collection they are archiving is diverse and pulls from most musical disciplines, from artists a round the world.

How the Internet Archive is Digitizing LPs to Preserve Generations of Audio

Earlier this year, the Internet Archive began working with the Boston Public Library (BPL) to digitize more than 100,000 audio recordings from their sound collection. The recordings exist in a variety of historical formats, including wax cylinders, 78 rpms, and LPs. They span musical genres including classical, pop, rock, and jazz, and contain obscure recordings like this album of music for baton twirlers, and this record of radio’s all-time greatest bloopers.