The Arhoolie Foundation’s Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican American
and Mexican Recordings
In an effort to make our collection accessible to the general public we are
uploading videos of our 78rpm collection to Youtube and as of today we have
uploaded over 10,000 videos https://www.youtube.com/c/fronteracollection
Each video features a recording of the entire 78, scan of the label, with
all the metadata and notes listed in the “show more” section. We continue to
upload 99 videos every day (we have 24,000 more songs to go from the 78s).
Since we started in April we have had over 550,000 views and close to 1,000
overwhelmingly positive, informative, and often emotional comments (99.9%
in Spanish). We have created several play lists to help navigate the channel
and will create more.
As some of you know, we have a long standing partnership with UCLA and have
a Frontera website on their Digital Library site.
http://frontera.library.ucla.edu/ We have over 125,000 recordings up on
that site along with a blog by author Agustín Gurza, but unless you log in
from the UCLA domain, you can only listen to 90 seconds. For years people
have ask for more accessibility. The Youtube site does not replace the UCLA
site, it compliments it, and drives people to the UCLA site. The traffic to
the UCLA site has increased tenfold since we started the Youtube channel. We
continue to add more recordings to the UCLA site as we digitize more.
The search function on the Youtube site is extremely helpful The best way to
find things is to only search the Frontera Collection channel (you have to
do this from a desktop, or using the mobile version of the site in a browser
– you can’t use the youtube mobile app which for some reason won’t allow you
to search a specific channel.). You can search for the title, artists,
catalog number, matrix number, label, as well as musical style and subject
matter which we have tagged.
Many of the videos have been claimed as copyrighted (both correctly and some
totally incorrectly) but Youtube has only totally blocked 2 videos and has
blocked about another 10 in certain countries. Theoretically, Youtube is
paying royalties on those copyrighted recordings and at some point those
right holders could monetize those videos. The Arhoolie Foundation claims no
rights to the music in the videos and does not try to monetize them.
The Arhoolie Foundation’s Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican American
and Mexican Recordings is an archive of over 160,000 individual recordings
on cylinder, 78, 45, LPs, cassettes, reel to reel master tapes and a few CDs
collected and donated to the Foundation mostly by Chris Strachwitz.
Tom Diamant
Director – Frontera Digitizing Project
Arhoolie Foundation
10341 San Pablo Ave.
El Cerrito, CA 94530
Phone: 510-525-7471
<http://www.arhoolie.org/> www.arhoolie.org
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