The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Kickstarter page can be found at http://tinyurl.com/ky6cgur. The campaign ends in 23 days but had already raised $5,306, as of Monday.
The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra has the same problem that you have.
It is busting at the seams with documents, recordings, photographs, film canisters, old videotapes, all threatening to explode out of the 300-square-foot closet in the Woodruff Arts Center where the material is stored.
The ASO’s memorabilia tell the story of some of the world’s greatest musicians and track the transformation of a regional orchestra into a world-class arts organization.
While the performances and interviews on these recordings are imperishable, some of the recordings themselves are disintegrating. To keep this library of information from being lost to history, the symphony has begun a Kickstarter campaign to digitize some of the most vulnerable items.
The modest $5,000 campaign would pay for studio time at a production facility that would, for example, transfer two recordings from archaic 1-inch videotape to a digital medium. “I can’t play it,” the ASO’s volunteer archivist, Bob Scarr, said of one of the recordings, a 90-minute tape of Robert Shaw leading the ASO in a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
In fact, Georgia Public Television, which recorded the performance years ago, doesn’t have the equipment to play the tape either, Scarr said. “It’s jokingly referred to as an endangered format,” Scarr said. “Time is running out — either the film is going bad or no one’s going to have the equipment any more to play it. … What they’re going to do is migrate the recording onto a format that I can now use and show people.”
The campaign will also help buy a scanner to digitize more than 1,000 photographs from the ASO’s 70-year history, plus a 4-terabyte external hard drive to store the images.
The archives include more than 800 audiovisual recordings on various formats, 500 audiotapes, 150 scrapbooks of news clippings and old programs, thousands of photographs and slides, boxes of old artists contracts, minutes of board meetings, and other material.
They fill hundreds of banker’s boxes in that crowded room, telling the story of the ASO, which began in 1945 as the Atlanta Youth Symphony under the direction of Henry Sopkin, a music educator from Chicago. Sopkin remained with the organization for more than two decades and built it from a youth ensemble into a regional orchestra.
The organization flowered under the baton of Shaw, who arrived in 1967 and served as music director until 1988.
Kickstarter is a crowd-funding enterprise that focuses on supporting projects in the creative fields. The ASO’s campaign began last week and has already exceeded its goal.
The symphony is accustomed to multimillion-dollar fundraising campaigns, and its modest goals for the Kickstarter campaign bely grander ambitions. “The development staff at the ASO are using me as a guinea pig to see how this works,” Scarr said. “They wanted to have early success.”
In particular, the symphony wanted to begin planning celebrations of its 70th anniversary, which will take place during the 2014-2015 season.
“This is only the beginning of an extensive project to grow the ASO’s archives and celebrate the rich history of one of the nation’s finest orchestras,” said Stanley E. Romanstein, president and CEO of the orchestra.
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