Steve_Graham@ub.cc.umich.edu (01/02/91)
January 2, 1991 Stadium Place, Ann Arbor. In the past I've always been rather out of sympathy with record companies which tended to lose things in their libraries; now I begin to understand: I've just been digging in my personal tape library for various tapes made by a friend over the years. Although I've been a cataloger since the beginning, and my library is fairly well maintained, I had some trouble finding things. Some things were not cataloged because they didn't seem important enough to be part of the "official" library at the time, but now are wanted; some because they were added to "side two" of quarter-track tapes as an afterthought, side one containing the material of interest. Some items were shuffled back and forth between reels as a result of my occasional attempts to reorganize, and got lost in that shuffle; and others slipped through the cracks from the various changes I have occasionally made in my system of cataloging. (After the library has reached a certain size one never seems quite to catch up with the back catalog.) Now that I am beginning to lose things in spite of having a relatively small library, maintained by the person who has intimate personal knowledge of each recording, it's easier to see how things could get lost in a vast record company library which is maintained by a number of employees each with their own approach and who do not have personal knowledge of the tapes and disks they oversee, though one hopes, of course, that such libraries are maintained more formally and rigorously. Of course, this will *never* happen once I get my new, computerized database up to speed... --Steve (ps: I just spent about 15 min. uploading this file. Ain't computers (especially antiquated ones with undocumented software) grand? Not complaining...)