Inventory and Preservation of Folk and Traditional Music Collection

All project targets were achieved. 380 rare historical and previously unreleased Minnesota folk and traditional music recordings which had been housed in cardboard boxes and stored in basements and closets were inventoried, rehoused in archival storage boxes and transferred to a climate controlled storage facility. Since two of the four collections were accompanied by detailed listings of their contents, the resulting data base contains over 2200 lines of meta data (see attached example for more detail). Over 100 artists whose performances are contained in these collections were contacted to request permission for enhanced accessibility by the public to some of the recordings. By the project's completion date 25 artists had responded giving permission to use recordings of their works for enhanced public accessibility to these collections. Since 12/1/15 more artists have granted permission and the total now stands at 34. Even if no other artists grant the requested permissions to stream some of their performances on line, use them in radio broadcasts and include them in future anthology releases, the current amount of material accessible for these purposes is more than enough to accomplish the intended outcome -- that of making the public more aware of the Folk Music Archive at Elmer L. Andersen Library and giving them convenient access to a representational portion of it online, on the air and on CD releases.