Digital Objects: Jazz Records

For my exhibit, I chose to highlight a selection of jazz records from my extensive collection of vinyl records. The items selected represent a mixture of original pressings, reissues, and modern releases from across the jazz music landscape. I chose to assemble my exhibit on jazz recordings because I aim to work in audio archival, and I could easily see myself using Omeka S as a means of presenting pieces in an archive to a digital audience via a virtual exhibit or even just a blog post (like this one).

Items in my exhibit:
Gabor Szabo – Dreams
Thelonious Monk – Palo Alto
Herbie Hancock – Head Hunters
John Coltrane – A Love Supreme
Miles Davis – Bitches Brew

In addition to a title and description, I chose to tag my items using the following DublinCore metadata fields:
– Class
– Type
– Date
– Format
– Language
– Publisher
– Date issued
I also chose to tag all of my items with Friend Of A Friend’s “name” field.

I chose these metadata fields because I felt they best reflected the information that museum, archive, or library patrons may be interested in when browsing a selection of recorded music. “Type” is a versatile field that can be used to convey information such as genre, compositional style, and even specific instruments. “Date” gives chronological and historical context to a recording. “Format” tells the viewer how a recording was released; this can also offer chronological/historical context, as formats constantly fade in and out of favor with both recording industry professionals, audiophiles, and consumers alike. “Language” may provide some cultural or geographic context for a recording; most jazz recordings are instrumental, but knowing which language is used for liner notes or occasional vocal lines can greatly enhance one’s understanding of a recording. “Publisher” is both a bibliographic tag as well as a mark of quality in the music world; the label an album is released on is often an indicator of its worthiness within a genre. Labels such as Blue Note, Impulse!, and Riverside are renowned for their legendary jazz releases. Finally, “Date Issued” is a wholly separate metadata indicator from “Date,” and with good reason. Music is often released and subsequently re-released, and knowing when a specific issue of a recording was produced can convey a wealth of information. Viewers can glean that a recording was of sufficient quality to warrant a reissue. They may also be interested to know if a recording was produced early enough to be sourced from the original master tapes, as these tapes can degrade or become unusable over time making future editions sound inferior to the original. Additionally, I utilized Friend of a Friend’s “name” tag in order to designate myself as the individual that contributed the entry as per assignment instructions.

In describing these objects, I struggled at first with exactly which aspects should be described. I started by describing qualities of the music itself, but after a while I realized it would make more sense to describe the provenance of the actual object: the vinyl record. For instance, with the Thelonious Monk – Palo Alto record, while the music present on the record may have been recorded in 1968, it was not officially pressed and released to consumers until 2020, over 50 years after it was recorded and over 35 years after Monk’s passing in 1982. This means the provenance of the item itself begins in 2020, even though the history of the music extends much farther back. Tagging these items in adherence to the qualities of the music may have benefits for researchers of the recording itself, but for people like me that are interested in the licensing and manufacturing process of physical music, it would leave out tons of important and useful information.