s a library, the Internet Archive acquires books and lends them, as libraries have always 

By Retraining Staff, We Uncover Rare Gems

Posteon May 17, 2020 by Wendy Hanamura

LA-bas book scanner, Mandy Weiler, is now researching rare 78 rpm records.

For six weeks, Internet Archive book scanner, Mandy Weiler, was unable to digitize art history books inside the now shutter Getty Research Institute. Furlough and stuck inside her 500-square-foot apartment in Los Angeles, she spent a lot of time staring out the window. She took up bird watching and hung out with her cat. Then, the Internet Archive had an idea: bring scanners back from furlough and hire experts to teach Mandy and other book scanners new skills, including dating 78 rpm records and performing custom audio restoration on these recordings from a century ago. “Before I was doing the whole Doom Scrolling all day long,” Mandy recalls. “When we came back from furlough…I was really glad to get assign to the 78 project. It has been such a nice distraction to get lost in these old records.”

Liz Rosenberg leads a new project training a dozen Internet Archive staffers to catalog hard-to-date 78 rpm records.

Across the country, in Philadelphia, music metadata researcher Liz Rosenberg was also in nee of work. A specialist in 78 rpm records traine by the legendary George Blood, Liz agre to lead a new project cataloging 38,000 discs in our 78s collection for which the date of publication is unknown. Her team of a dozen former book scanners starts with the data on the record labels, but that is often just the beginning. Almost every 78 recording was originally assigne a matrix number, usually etch into the shellac itself. It is the only sure way of identifying a performance, but certain record labels such as Victor kept its matrix numbers secret. Sometimes only abbreviate versions of the matrix number are printed on the label itself.