Crossroads of History, RCA/Victor style

How often do you expect to get a question about pre-1940 Korean phonograph records? If you answer the Inbox at the David Sarnoff Library, you could on it happening once in a lifetime because of Victor Talking Machine Company and RCA Victor's international operations. But this month, to our surprise, two scholars made inquiries, with an Argentinian graduate student inserting her request about the Victor 1920s offshoot, the Pan American Recording Company, in-between. Not everyone got what they hoped for, but the Library's executive director, Alex Magoun, demonstrated an intangible and invaluable value to the scholars but suggesting alternative sources and linking together people with shared interests.

First up was Yamauchi "Yanchy" Fumitaka of University of Tokyo's Institute of Oriental Culture. A cultural anthropologist by training, Yanchy is studying the relationships created between Japan and Korea by sound recording early in the 20th century, when Japan dominated Korea's audio entertainment industry. After completing a semester at Yale University through the Todai-Yale Initiative, he arranged a visit to the Library to draw on its runs of RCA publications for information on the company's international connections in the 1920s and early 1930s.

Three weeks later, after Yanchy had returned to the humidity of Tokyo in August, Mi-Hye Chyun of Rider University's Westminster Choir College emailed the Library about several Korean records made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1908 and 1910. The Library doesn't have a set of Victor's catalogs, but Alex put her in touch with Yanchy and connected her to the University of California, Santa Barbara's Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings. The discographers note on their site that their knowledge of East Asian Victor recordings is especially weak, so perhaps these connections will help improve it.

Just as Yanchy was sitting down to begin paging through the RCA News, in came an email from Marina Cañardo of the University of Buenos Aires (Universidad de Buenos Aires). Marina is a doctoral student in musicology and is researching "the relationship between Argentine popular music and the recording industry in the 1920s." Alex wrote her what he knew about sources in the United States and connected her to Yanchy and his professional colleague, Professor Susan Schmidt-Horning of St. John's University. Professor Schmidt-Horning is finishing her book, Chasing Sound: Recording Studios in America, almost as this is written, and looks forward to meeting her new colleagues at a suitable SHOT or ICOHTEC or other scholarly meeting.

Would you like to know what the Library and other organizations offer in the field of recording history? Here's what Alex wrote Marina:

". . . we have posted the significant Victor documents owned by the Library on the website: the two Sooy memoirs (based on their journals) and the history of Victor by B(enjamin). L. Aldridge.
. . . Unfortunately, the David Sarnoff Library has no information on the corporate operation of the Victor company or its domestic or international recording groups. Mr. Sarnoff kept virtually no records of his management of RCA, and we have yet to receive any collections of papers related to Victor's record business.

"BMG, which bought RCA Records from General Electric Company in 1987, has records of recording dates at its archives in New York City. But corporate archives do not exist for outside researchers, and it is difficult to get access to BMG's Victor data.

"The best source that I know of is Eldridge Johnson's papers. Johnson started and ran Victor until 1927. His papers are located at the American Heritage Center in Wyoming, with photocopies at the Johnson Victrola Museum in Dover, Delaware. His correspondents included the head of the recording division and possibly Mr. Staats. Unfortunately, the AHC does not list the collection in its online catalog, and the Victrola Museum is not easily used by archival researchers, especially at a distance.

"Another source of information would be the 78-L List. The variety of collectors there may be able to help you with specific questions.

"Victor published a magazine, Voice of the Victor, for its dealers for about 25 years. There is a Spanish-language version for Latin America from 1915-31. A dealer in Uruguay sold several copies on Ebay several years ago. The Camden County Historical Society in Camden, NJ, has a large set of the English-language edition, and the Glendale Public Library in California has a large but incomplete collection as well.

"Some other writers on the music side of the record business are Ruth Glasser (My Music is my Flag: Puerto Rican Musicians and Their New York Communities, 1917-1940; U. of California Press, 2000) and David Suisman (The Sound of Money: Music, Machines, and Markets, 1890-1925, Columbia University dissertation, 2002), and William Howland Kenney (Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945; Oxford U. P., 1999). Their bibliographies may offer you some other avenues for research."

The Archival Production Line

If you had 3,000 photonegatives sitting in acidifying cellulose sleeves, you'd want to rehouse them, wouldn't you? That's one of the challenges facing the Library, and a concerted effort this summer by archival assistants old and new has resolved it. The photonegatives in this case contain 4" by 5" images of the RCA Laboratories staff taken between in-house by Norm Newell, Tom Cooke, and Marty Zak from the 1950s to the 1980s. Everyone who needed a photo for a passport, an award, or a c.v. got a photo, and a sleeve with their name and the date it was taken. Everyone from A to S, that is, the last tray of negatives being absent when executive director Alex Magoun retrieved them from the Labs' abandoned photo laboratory. He put them in archival boxes designed for minimal chemical activity and the trapping of any reactive off-gassing from the photos. But who was going to remove those sleeves slowly yellowing as their translucent cellulose broke down?

The answer lay in the Library's crack crew of students from West Windsor-Plainsboro High School North and South Brunswick High School. Since this spring Adnan Khan, Kishore Riyali, Ujaas Barvalia, Harshal Patel, Samarth Patel, Pooja Mantha, Pranavi Vemuri, and Rajiv Putcha began the tedious task of copying the information on the old sleeve and removing each negative and sliding it into an inert polypropylene sleeve. They printed neatly, deciphered the sometimes flowing script and scrawls of the photographers, and most moved on to other pursuits this summer. Rajiv, however, brought his brother Rohith and sister Rohini to the Library, and they in turn recruited their friend Rahul Parekh. Halfway through the L-N box (R. P. Labe - F. Nyman), they caught a flyer, created an efficient system that still let them talk, and moved through the rest of the collection in jig time. Way to go, gang!

IEEE Researcher Visits the Library

Every year the IEEE History Center hosts a young scholar for a summer internship, during which she or he can work on a project at the center or draw on near-by scholarly resources. This summer, Alejandro Casasempere Garcia from the Technical University of Madrid is working on his master's thesis, "The Role of the White House in the Establishment of a Government Radio Monopoly in the U.S.: The Case of RCA." Through the offices of the Center's executive director, Michael Geselowitz, Alejandro visited the David Sarnoff Library. Alex Magoun, executive director, reviewed the Library's holdings, including the transcript of a 1919 meeting convened by Sarnoff on the middle managers' perspective of the transition from British-owned subsidiary to American company. Our thanks to Endicott College intern David Upperco for scanning this document five years ago for uses just like this. Alex also discussed the archival resources for the leading individuals involved in the establishment of the Radio Corporation of America, some of which are located at Princeton University. Alejandro also had the opportunity to visit the original entrance to the RCA Laboratories, while Mike and Alex discussed the History Center's Milestones Program in front of the plaque for the invention of electronic, monochrome-compatible, color television.

The World's Youngest Archival Assistant?

Until someone proves us differently, Vivian Zhang is the world's youngest archival assistant. A hardworking fourth-grade student in Montgomery, New Jersey, she helps at the Library on holidays, thanks to her father, who works at Sarnoff Corporation. Since last spring, when Vivian helped dry out hundreds of color slides, she has also assisted with resleeving and relabeling the negative collection of RCA Laboratories staff and rehousing Jan Rajchman's publications series in archival folders. Vivian's attention to detail, clear handwriting, dedication, and good humor are a big help not only to us but to future researchers!

Kaimal Completes Broadcast Manual Index

It was a dull job, but someone had to do it, and that someone was Vrinda Kaimal. Like other volunteers she started with one day a week, and then as the pages turned and she kept typing into a spreadsheet the dot-matrixed printed entries from the RCA Broadcast Manuals Index (1930-1984), something magical happened. She began coming in two days, and then three, caught up in the lines of print, patiently tapping away at MI and IB numbers, and esoteric entries like this:

31535 B1 ES-561485/6/7 BTG-5AL/10AL/20AL/20AR AUTOMATIC LOGGING EQUIPMENT,

where 31535 equals the IB (Instruction Book) number, B1 the file cabinet and drawer that no longer exist, ES-561485/6/7 the MI (Master Index) number, and BTG-5AL/10AL/20AL/20AR the model numbers for a device related to Broadcast Transmitters.

Wouldn't that make your eyeballs glaze over before they fell on to the keyboard? Not Vrinda's. After all, this 20-year-old binder and its 61 pages of single-spaced entries represent the only control to the 25 file cabinets of manuals donated to the Library through the good offices of Stu Cooke. While the flood last spring dissolved all the marked archival boxes holding the manuals, this spreadsheet will enable us to inventory what's in the freeze-dried boxes. Then we can try to fill in for the water-ruined copies with the duplicates sorted by Phil Vourtsis in his quiet times in the basement in 2006:

So hats to Vrinda and to Phil for their part in the unending labors of establishing intellectual control over the ever-growing holdings of our archives!

Madame Librarian!

This just in! Our super volunteer, Sharon Chapman, who has helped with everything from War of the Worlds to processing the Vladimir Zworykin and Harry Olson Collections to recruiting junior archivists to firing up this blog and our de.lic.ious account, has received official notice of Rutgers University's conferral of her master's degree in Library and Information Sciences:

MLIS October 2007
Program: LIBRARY AND INFORMATION STUDIES
Completed: N.A.S.D.T.E.C.
Approved Curriculum: EDUCATIONAL MEDIA SPECIALIST

We are extremely pleased to have both benefited from her degree-related projects and offered the Library as a site for her class work. Congratulations, Sharon!

Volunteers Brainstorming Session Monday, October 15th!

Remember to come to our fifth and final Volunteer Brainstorming Session of the fall on Monday, October 15th at 7:30 at the library. We will focus on the Archives, including cataloging, rehousing and storage of the collections of RCA broadcast manuals, technical reports and lab notebooks that were damaged during last April's flood. Please come for conversation and snacks, and feel free to bring a friend!

What They Did for Their Summer Vacation

The summer of 2007 was the summer of volunteers for the Library, and most of them are local high school students. What started with one in the fall of 2006 has snowballed into twelve. They hail from West Windsor-Plainsboro High School North and perform a variety of invaluable archival services, ranging from cataloging to sorting to rehousing to digitizing RCA collections of documents and periodicals.

Kunal Deopare, the pioneer, started scanning the lab notebook pages of RCA Labs staff who contributed to the invention of liquid crystal displays (LCDs) in the 1960s. Swapnil Mhatre joined him a few weeks later and after scanning to PDF format several hundred 1940s and 1950s RCA Princeton engineering memos and technical reports, he started in full-time last summer on scanning the 31 volumes of RCA Engineer, 1955-86. These illustrated magazines, published four to six times a year, contain articles by technical and managerial staff on new and old technologies, from radio and TV antennas to space cameras to solid-state lasers and computers, and how they fit in the company's changing strategies for return on investment.

Over the winter of 2006-7, they were joined by Ujaas Barvalia, Adnan Khan, Kishore Ryali, Hamad Masood, and Kirin Masood, joined in the scanning and downloading of reports, and did the preliminary sorting and weeding of the collections of John Coleman, biophysicist and super-electron microscope designer, and Charlie Wine, Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at the David Sarnoff Research Center. Over the summer, with Jonathan Slawitzky, they removed the oxidizing (rusting) metal fasteners and foldered some 2,500 Princeton Engineering Memos between 1952 and 1969, and are gearing up for the Princeton and Zurich Technical Reports.

In addition this summer we saw Rohit and Renuka Reddy, and Vidya Nandarpurkar and Aleesha Shaik come on board. Rohit is busy digitizing and formatting for davidsarnoff.org the history of the invention of electronic color television at RCA's Princeton Labs, 1945-54, while Renuka is carefully typing into a spreadsheet the somewhat chaotic handtyped index to the Labs' newsletter, Radiations (so named in a contest by Labs staff member Lawrence Giacoletto to reflect RCA's use of electromagnetic phenomena in its products). Last but hardly least, over the summer Vidya Nandarpurkar typed in the annual tables of contents for RCA Review, the company's elite technical journal, 1952-86, into a spreadsheet and then scanned to PDF all the Reviews' contents from 1936-64 before school started. She recruited Aleesha Shaik to join her, and Aleesha has rehoused and relabeled in archival (acid- and lignin-free) envelopes some 2,500 4x5 photonegatives for the Carl Byoir RCA collection, before joining the PEM rehousing project. Executive Director Dr. Alex Magoun couldn't ask for a more productive and dynamic group of students, who are doing so much to preserve the legacy of invention and innovation at one of the country's greatest companies!

photo by Frank Wojciechowski

Calling All Volunteers!

These are exciting times for the David Sarnoff Library. We have big plans for the future - as more people have become aware of us, we're planning on serving the community in all sorts of unique and interesting ways.

With big plans, however, comes the need for manpower. With that in mind, we're holding five Brainstorming Sessions at the Library so that its Friends, old and new, can meet likeminded people dedicated to education and history, and help develop the programs that will shape the Library's future. Out of these sessions, we expect to form committees that will help executive director Alex Magoun expand the scope and scale of the Library's activities in accord with its mission.

All of these meetings will be held at the Library, will begin at 7:30, offer refreshments, and last approximately one hour -

1. Tuesday, September 18 - The annual War of the Worlds Broadcast fundraiser takes place on Saturday, October 27th. Help us plan and generate publicity, solicit sponsors for the Program, and promote the YouTube video contest!
2. Monday, September 24 - Field Trips. Our 3rd grade program on David Sarnoff, sound, and electronic communications needs docents and publicity. We also want to develop programs for middle school students in electricity, light, magnetism, video, and digital logic. If you like working with and inspiring children, or have ideas for hands-on activities, this is for you!
3. Tuesday, October 2 - Fundraising. We need to raise funds for field trips and exhibits, based on a strategy proposed by Library friend Michael Lundy and on our online store at cafepress.com/davidsarnoff: help us develop a Superfriends network and create popular RCA- and Nipper-related items!
4. Monday, October 8 - Tours. We expect an increased demand for tours this fall: can you help us prepare tours and schedules, or serve as a docent?
5. Monday, October 15 - Archives. We want to catalog, rehouse, and organize the collections of RCA Broadcast manuals, RCA technical reports, and lab notebooks recovered from April's devastating flood. Can you help?

We are looking forward to seeing many of you at these sessions. Come to as many as you think you can help with - we greatly appreciate whatever time, thought, and muscles you can offer.

If you have questions or suggestions, contact the Library by email or phone at (609) 734-2636.

The Library is located on Sarnoff Corporation's campus at 201 Washington Road, Princeton NJ 08540-6449. Directions can be found here. At the company's entrance, follow signs to the left for the Library and its "Private Entrance."