Blog Posts by Subject: Recorded Sound and Video

Over the course of the months that we were physically out of the building,materials continued to be ordered and processed. Here is a small selection ready to be shelved.

Newly available at the NYPL Music Division: The Otto Hess Photographs, a collection that includes images rare images of the record manufacturing process, as shown at the Varsity Records factory.

If you enjoy audiobooks, we have some great ways to browse titles, hear samples, and listen to an audiobook right on your phone. All you'll need to get an e-audiobook is a mobile app and a library card.

The Jerome Robbins Dance Division is pleased to belatedly announce that the final seven interviews documented with the Mertz Gilmore Foundation grant to record African dancers and choreographers working and teaching in New York are now online

New Release catalogs are useful today for researchers looking to determine the year a particular recording was released, and for the range of musical genres covered by a certain record label. While going through a section of EMI catalogs and brochures, we came across an interesting promotion for a geographically-themed LP series.

On June 25 and 26, the Library welcomed developers, designers, data scientists, audio producers, and others to a two-day hackathon designed to advance the cause of audio accessibility and explore future uses of media archives online.

Remembering Ali as a champion father figure in the black community—exemplifying strength, confidence, and a love for people around the world.

Organization, description, and presentation of sound is the theme for this exhibit, and listeners are offered a peek into how archival audio is made available to the public.

In 1985 the Black Rock Coalition (BRC) was formed as an outlet for alternative Black musicians to showcase their talents.

There is so much history wound up in these open reels that would not exist in any other form. The medium became available at a rich time in Dance history.

The Jerome Robbins Dance Division is pleased to announce that the five interviews documented with the Mertz Gilmore Foundation grant to record African choreographers and teachers are now online at The New York Public Library’s website.

Back in 1986 Panasonic thought they had the competitive answer to Sony's Betacam SP format. Their product was smaller, lighter and poised to take over the electronic news gathering (ENG) market. The plan must have looked great on paper, but the MII format was a disaster.

We love Halloween and want to celebrate it by sharing some great Halloween themed recordings we have in our holdings.

Writing can be a daunting task. You sit in front of a blank page. You try to make something where there was nothing, and your only material is language. Yet over the years, NYPL has spoken to dozens of writers who have faced exactly this challenge and ended up on the other side of a finished book. If you want to write, then get ready to take notes.

Guest post by Elin Øyen Vister.

There is something very unique about a listening program. It is not always typical to sit and listen without explanation or visual stimulation. On the evening of February 6th, about 50 people gathered in Bruno Walter Auditorium for New York's first Kinokophonography Night here at LPA, where we asked the audience to do just that: sit and listen.

The return of Daylight Saving Time means that we have all just experienced a temporal displacement. Let’s set Time Machine back by a small increment and briefly revisit the VHS format.

My studio is an interchange where I coax content from the past, sometimes, the content itself is looking back to a more distant past, creating a cloverleaf-like feedback loop. The Early Years, *MGZIC 9-950, is one of the current projects that has come to mind in the cloverleaf.

Upon taking physical possession of the piece, my mind was set on two objectives. The first was to prove to myself that the drum head really was what it appeared to be. And number two, proving to the collecting world in general that this was, in fact, the Sullivan show drum head.