NEW YORK (CelebrityAccess) The ARChive of Contemporary Music (ARC) in New York has launched a GoFundMe page to raise $100,000 to keep the not-for-profit private research library open.
The ARC, in TriBeCa, has 3 million physical audio recordings, mostly on vinyl records and in recent years the founder, Bob George, has been working with the Internet Archive to digitize many of its rare 78s for broader access and preservation. George opened the ARC in 1985 when his record collection outgrew his apartment.
From Rolling Stone:
Far from the kind of crackpot hoarding that sometimes happens in cities, George’s archive has been supported by powerhouses in music and entertainment. It houses Keith Richards’ blues collection. Their current board is varied enough to include both Youssou N’Dour and Paul Simon (Lou Reed and David Bowie were both once members). It consulted for Tom Hanks on the making of That Thing You Do. It’s the go-to repository for album art for everything from Grammy exhibits to Taschen books… George’s commitment is dogged. When Martin Scorsese wanted an obscure Italian song in Goodfellas, George roamed Little Italy humming the tune until someone recognized it (“You can solve every problem in New York if you just walk through it,” he says).
At a time when some in the city were scrubbing Keith Haring murals off subway platforms, George was welcoming every genre, including then-unpopular punk and hip-hop (among the archive’s greatest collection is a trove of punk 45s). “We could make the good and goofy come alive,” he says, “because no museum or university library is going to do that. They only want things after they’ve gotten valuable. It’s a small view of value. We see things differently. We see the value in everything.”
The GoFundMe page is available here. According to the page:
We preserve copies of each version of every recording, in all known formats. You can listen to 118,800+ 78rpm discs that we helped collect, and sample audio on a portion of our CD collection – 166,887 CDs . Anyone can borrow more than 3,000 of our music books online . You can see all we do on our website, www.arcmusic.org . Our passion for music from other cultures has led us to create a series of online and live events. To date these “music weeks” include explorations of the music of the Muslim world , Brazil , India , Cuba . Because of the breadth and quality of our holdings, ARC was chosen to supply scans of thousands of record covers for the opening of The Nesuhi Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame at Lincoln Center in New York City and the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, California.
