Revealing a Hidden Collection: Collaborative Cataloging of Arabic 78s in the Archive of World Music

As part of a recent Harvard Library initiative to shed light on its “hidden collections,” the Archive of World Music in the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library received funding to make accessible a substantial collection of early ethnic 78 rpm disc recordings. The primary strengths of this collection are 10- and 12-inch discs from the Middle East, South Asia and Asia; not surprisingly, most of these regions present language challenges for local music library cataloging. Priority was given to South Asian and Arabic recordings based on the overall strengths of the Archive, and our collaborative approach to cataloging the Arabic discs is the focus of this paper.
Many of these performances exist in no other format. By making the recordings discoverable via Harvard’s online catalog, with richer and fuller descriptions, we join others in providing greater access to early sound documents for a community of students, faculty and researchers. Local access to selected recordings is provided via digital files reformatted from the original 78 rpm discs. As permitted by copyright, we also plan to make some of these reformatted recordings more widely available in the future. In addition to the value of the recorded performance, these discs also serve as artifacts that document the ethnic commercial recorded output of specific countries or multinational labels.