Music
CBC has to get rid of most of its CD and vinyl archives by March
by Nicole Villeneuve
January 24, 2012
The Globe and Mail has a good story on the dismantling of the CBC’s music archives that is currently underway across the country at the regional archives.
Currently, due to “uncertainty over levels of funding from Ottawa,” the CBC has until the end of March to pare down its collection, with important titles joining the primary archive in Toronto, which is not being affected. Otherwise, the CBC is looking to digitize much of its content for use in an upcoming new CBC web project.
“We’re going to look at what content has historic value, what has a programming value to us,” a CBC spokesperson Chris Ball told the Globe. “The goal here is that we are digitizing that content in the virtual music library. What that’s going to be able to do is give everybody across the country [in the CBC] desktop access to our entire music library.”
But Vancouver archivist John MacMillan thinks it’s happening too fast and fears the broadcaster will lose something of cultural value in the hasty process. “It is a time-consuming process to go through, to make sure that we’re not tossing something away that doesn’t exist in a modern format. The thing about this that is most rankling to me is that, sure, we knew that this had to happen. But it is happening way too fast.”
The purge could be good for collectors—some might be donated or sold, but, ultimately, some might simply have to be discarded. Read the full story here.
