8.30am~5.00pm, May 28, 2011~July 30, 2012

Venue: Catalogue Hall, First floor

This exhibition features old music records selected from Shanghai Library’s proud holding of 200,000+ gramophone records and reviews the digitization efforts in the recent years as well as the donated items from all walks of life.

The opening ceremony of the exhibition, titled “The beat of drums from afar”, was held on May 28 to kick off the serial activities and events to celebrate the diamond jubilee of Shanghai Library, which was founded in July 1952. 

The birth of phonograph record dates back to 130 years ago. In 1913, the Saint Paul Public Library of Minnesota, U.S. started the acquisition and collection of music records. Afterwards, gramophone records became a special and routine collection of libraries in the European and American countries. 

In China however, collection of the gramophone records had been largely found among the populace, and didn’t enter the library holding categories until the 1970s. 

Nowadays Shanghai Library is one of the leading public libraries in China in terms of the gramophone record collections which accounts for some 200,000 items in a diversity of genres. 

However, today many discs made from wax and vinyl are becoming fragile, crisp, worn out and even split due to heavy use, natural aging and poor storage conditions. On the other hand, with gramophones being phased out by new generation playback devices, the records are in rare use, leaving the precious sound materials that they bear gradually fading out as time goes by. 

Therefore to rescue, repair and renovate the sound materials of these old records has become a top priority of Shanghai Library. 

The digitization project for old gramophone records at Shanghai Library was initiated in June 2009 beginning with the Chinese language records. An effective working procedure, running from the state-of-being screening through cleaning, acoustical testing, cataloguing and registration, transformation and digitization and digital data interlinking, has now taken shape after three years of experiment and practice. 

Through smart noise reduction technology the original sound files are digitized without loss of fidelity and damage to the tracks and surfaces. So far as now, a total of 130,000 old Chinese records in 7,000 albums have been digitized, covering genres of Chinese traditional operas, local folk arts and songs. 

Starting in recent years, many old gramophone records have been donated by public organizations and individuals and are being digitized. The donors are then bestowed with a donation certificate along with a compact disc digitized from the original wax or vinyl one.