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----- Original Message ----- From: <[log in to unmask]> > ARSCLIST is about preserving sound, not artifacts. OBJECTION!! Your honour, ... --- The actual name is *A*ssociation of *R*ecorded *S*ound *C*ollections. What that means, since we are not all out with our battery-powered cassete recorders with built-in microphones (passing thought...SHOULD we be?) what we are, in theory, preserving, is extant sound RECORDINGS... which are most definitely "artifacts!" However, another of our duties (too often ignored at the behest of neo-populist governments) is to create archives. These archives must be of the original "documents" (used here for both paper documents and recordings)...AND... information both ABOUT and ON those "documents!" Having the sonic contents of a given recording is interesting and may be enjoyable...but this, as an entity, tells us nothing about the circumstances involved with the recording! Who made it...when... FOR whom...and under what circumstances? Was this the initial recording of the song? Many times the story OF the recording...how it came to be, why, etc. & so on...is more interesting than the recording itself! In fact, this story may have more to say about the historic details of an era than does the recording! But...many of us...by accident or (I hope) by choice...are also archivists. We go beyond looking at/playing an old recording and thinking/assuming "Hm-m-m...that's enjoyable to listen to!" Our (self-)assigned task is to fit the recording, as an artifact (both sonic and physical) into the appropriate timeline of history... and, having done so, preserve: 1) The actual recording in its original form 2) Any facts we have been able to establish about both the recording itself and the copy (possibly literally such?) in our posession 3) The sonic contents...the sound which was in theory created at the time and thus transferred to some more permanent form. As you can see, any single part of this gives us only a partial "picture"...and thus a partial understanding of the importance...of the entity in question! Finally, one more point...by creating a sonic archive using today's technology, which is to a certain extent limited (and possibly will not be to the same extent in the future)...are we not effectively creating only a partial archive? We listen to acoustic recordings of artists who only made such, and think "I wonder what the ACTUAL sound was like." By the same token, imagine a future where the limits of digital archiving have approached the molecularly- defined limnitations of analog recording...and our archive is defined by 1990's sound-file limitations... ...stevenc