National Recording Preservation Board of the Library of Congress

Chartered by Congress in 2000, this advisory board is made up of representatives of numerous audio organization and other authorities, and is charged with developing a national collection of the best of all kinds of recorded sound. I have served on the board since 2004, focusing especially on the preservation of all kinds of broadcast material: program series, special broadcasts, television audio, and the like.

Websites

National Recording Preservation Board

National Film Preservation Board

The Packard Campus of the Library of Congress

Motion Picture, Broadcasting & Recorded Sound Division,
Library of Congress

Suggested Books

Attwood, David. Sound Design: Classic Audio & Hi-Fi Design. London: Octopus, 2002.  Illustrated album of changing design of players, speakers and related equipment.

Bamburger, Rob, and Sam Brylawski. The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States: A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age. Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources/Library of Congress, 2010. Best current analysis of what can be and is being done, plus review of obstacles to such preservation.

Chanon, Michael. Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effects on Music. London: Verso, 1995. More emphasis on the recording business and its trends.

Dearling, Robert and Celia. The Guinness Book of Recorded Sound.  Enfield, England: Guinness Superlatives, 1984.  Useful especially for its British and European content on both equipment development and music.

Hoffman, Frank, ed. Encyclopedia of Recorded Sound.  New York: Routledge, 2005 (2 vols). People, events, technologies, places, and what was recorded—all in entries of various lengths, often illustrated.

Kenney, William Howland. Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. The companies, performers, and the audience for musical records through World War II.

Kraft, James P. Stage to Studio: Musicians and the Sound Revolution, 1890-1950. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.  The revolution that technology wrought for musicians in radio, music recordings, and the movies–and some of its implications.

Millard, Andre. America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005 (2nd ed.).  Covers the initial acoustic recording era, then electrical (analog) recordings and the early digital period.

Morton, David L. Jr. Off the Record: The Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America.  New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000.  Wide-ranging survey includes record companies, radio, office dictation machines, answering machines, and the tape recorder.

------. Sound Recording: The Life Story of a Technology.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.  Useful brief survey of improving methods over more than a century.

Read, Oliver, and Walter L. Welch. From Tinfoil to Stereo: Evolution of the Phonograph. Indianapolis: Howard W. Sams, 1976 (2nd ed.).  The definitive technical story of analog recording methods.

Steffen, David J. From Edison to Marconi: The First Thirty Years of Recorded Music. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005. Melds development of technology with music trends and uses.

Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.  Social impact of changing recording technologies, relating the cultural side of preserving sound.

Wurtzler, Steve J. Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.  The record, radio and film businesses behind the slowly improving sound recording process in the years before World War II.