78 rpm Record Digitization & Preservation

Collection of Recorded Sound at the Museum-Archive of Russian Culture, San Francisco

Since 2018, I have served as the curator at the Collection of Recorded Sound at the Museum-Archive of Russian Culture, San Francisco, where I have worked to catalog, preserve, and digitize over 3500 rare musical recordings. In 2020, I received an Internship Grant from the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies to create a detailed catalog of the collection and finding guide. The following year, the National Recording Preservation Foundation provided funding for me to digitize 200 recordings from the collection for the first time. These recordings can be listened to for free online at the Internet Archive and on the Russian-Records (Мир русской грамзаписи) database.

The Collection of Recorded Sound features:

- 78 rpm recordings made in St. Petersburg / Petrograd, Moscow, and elsewhere in the Russian Empire before 1917

- 78 rpm recordings made in the early Soviet Union and bootleg copies issued in the United States and Latin America

- 78 rpm recordings made by Russian musicians in Harbin, Manchuria and Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s

- 78 rpm recordings made by Russian émigré musicians in Australia, Argentina, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Japanese Empire, Latvia, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States, and Yugoslavia

- Near-complete catalog of recordings for Argee Records, Kismet Records, Stinson Records, Monitor Records, and the souvenir records sold at the Soviet Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair

- First pressings by Alexander Vertinsky, Feodor Chaliapin (including signed copies), Jaroff’s Don Cossack Choir, Jascha Heifetz, Peter Leschenko, and Sergei Rachmaninoff

- LPs produced made by Russian émigré musicians for independent record labels in California and the Pacific Northwest