- Laura Bliss Morris
- Thursday, August 31, 2023
A few weeks ago, I was casually chatting with my mother-in-law about some exciting new things happening at the library including the re-launch of our vinyl collection.
Come to find out, she was actually responsible for curating the library’s record collection when she worked at the library during the early 1970s. What are the odds?
With October also being National Family History Month, I knew I couldn’t miss the opportunity to pick her brain and capture a little library (and family) history in the process. Amazing how things really do come full circle.
Name:
Jennie Holmes Morris
Years Worked at Richland Library:
September 1970-September 1971
Job Title(s):
Library Assistant, circulating art and record collection
What years did you manage curating the library’s vinyl collection?
Just one year: Sept 1970-Sept 1971. I was hired at age 22, a recent college graduate with an undergraduate degree in English and art history, to assemble a collection of art for circulation. This would be a pilot project. The library already had a fledgling vinyl collection, so that was added to my duties. As a library assistant I also was expected to work the front desk, the children’s room, periodicals, and the branches as needed. It was a very varied job and I loved it.
What albums were popular when you managed the vinyl collection for Richland Library?
The Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan, beach music (Temptations), Motown (Supremes), folk (Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, Peter Paul & Mary), surprisingly not much country. The term “vinyl” was not commonly used to refer to recorded music, probably because that was the only choice you had. They were always called record albums or LPs (long playing records, mostly by disc jockeys). Singles or 45rpms became rare in the 70s and we didn’t carry them.
How did you improve or expand the collection?
There wasn’t much breadth to the collection in 1970. When I began curating, it was almost entirely current popular music with a few outliers thrown in (see “fun memories” below). I added more symphonic and chamber music, blues and jazz, music from other cultures, musical theater, opera and experimental.
What was the most popular place to order records from?
Like most libraries, we had a subscription to the Schwann Catalogue. By the 1970s the catalogue had been split into two volumes: the monthly Schwann-1 included all stereo classical and jazz recordings and stereo popular albums less than two years old. The semi-annual Schwann-2 included all monaural albums, older pop recordings, and spoken word.
Do you remember what they used to cost?
A stereo album cost about $7.00
Approximately how many records were available in the collection?
Several hundred. Because vinyl was the only available format, the collection needed to be very broad and deep.
What was one of the hardest parts of working with Vinyl?
Replacing the frequently broken and scratched records
What do you think about bringing vinyl lending back to the library?
Even though now there are so many ways to listen to music, I think it will be very popular. Audiophiles have always claimed that vinyl has a warmer sound than digital recordings and some contemporary pop groups have released albums only on vinyl.
Do you have any other fun memories from working with the vinyl collection that you’d like to share?
As I started working with the collection, I noticed two disproportionate clumps of albums that seemed odd:
One of my predecessors was a member of a local band and a huge, HUGE Bee Gees fan. This was long before Saturday Night Fever and their future command of the charts. So, our collection included every Bee Gees album plus duplicates before most patrons knew their music.
There were several albums containing works by Victor Herbert. He was a turn of the 20th century American composer who wrote Gilbert & Sullivan style operettas. Naughty Marietta and Babes in Toyland were his most famous. By mid-century his compositions had gone out of style and remained so. Considering that we had no other works by American composers, I didn’t get it until I encountered the patron who insisted we buy still more Victor Herbert – “the most important American composer of the 20th century”.
Re-launched in October of 2022, Richland Library’s Vinyl Collection boasts more than 150 albums—offering customers a mix of genres and decades and featuring everything from classic rock to local favorites, classic country, Pop, Rap, and beyond. Browse online or in-person at Main and check out up to four albums at a time. When finished, simply return items inside at any Richland Library location. Don’t have a record player? No problem. Check one out from our Library of Things!