Finding info gripe

[Ben Madison]

It is getting frustrating to find relevant information on pipe organs.
case point.
I been needing some documents on a specific pipe organ. Issue is that the relevant info is locked in a archive states away.
so what I have to do is call this place and see if they can get me a scan of document.

their needs to be a websites where all info, contracts, specs needs to be available for people looking for it.

[toodles]

The Organ Historical Society database is an accessible resource, here: https://pipeorgandatabase.org/

[Ben Madison]

Been their though that is the issue. I looking for scaling and construction details.

[AllenAnalog]

Seriously Ben, you are sounding like a spoiled Millennial, expecting everyone else to do your work so it's available at the click of a mouse. Sorry to burst your Internet bubble but a high percentage of archived material will always be accessed only by visiting archives and institutions around the world.

While Google has scanned a lot of books and periodicals that are now available online, most archives don't have the staff, money or the inclination to have their vast holdings scanned, cataloged and captioned for posting online. Some have done a partial job of that but that is mostly because of grants to deal with material that is considered important to get out to a wider audience.

Many collections have material that cannot be scanned in a mechanized way but have to be done by hand, putting them on the scanner platen and manually scanned page by page. Some documents are too fragile to be handled by anyone other than trained archivists wearing gloves and working in controlled environments. That costs a lot of money.

I'm working on a talk I'm giving in June and along with hours of research online I've spent three weeks in archives gathering material and photographs. I was lucky at one location that they let me handle and manually scan the documents myself after some training. At another archive, I must fill out online request forms if I want any of the material I find scanned - and have to pay the staff to do so.

Considering the centuries of paper and photographic material held in archives, no technology is ever going to make it possible to put it all online given the amount of human work involved to process it.

[Pipeorganbuilder]

Could not agree more Larry. Everything you said is spot on. Thanks for speaking up.

Michael

[Ben Madison]

Seriously Ben, you are sounding like a spoiled Millennial, expecting everyone else to do your work so it's available at the click of a mouse. Sorry to burst your Internet bubble but a high percentage of archived material will always be accessed only by visiting archives and institutions around the world.

While Google has scanned a lot of books and periodicals that are now available online, most archives don't have the staff, money or the inclination to have their vast holdings scanned, cataloged and captioned for posting online. Some have done a partial job of that but that is mostly because of grants to deal with material that is considered important to get out to a wider audience.

Many collections have material that cannot be scanned in a mechanized way but have to be done by hand, putting them on the scanner platen and manually scanned page by page. Some documents are too fragile to be handled by anyone other than trained archivists wearing gloves and working in controlled environments. That costs a lot of money.

I'm working on a talk I'm giving in June and along with hours of research online I've spent three weeks in archives gathering material and photographs. I was lucky at one location that they let me handle and manually scan the documents myself after some training. At another archive, I must fill out online request forms if I want any of the material I find scanned - and have to pay the staff to do so.

Considering the centuries of paper and photographic material held in archives, no technology is ever going to make it possible to put it all online given the amount of human work involved to process it.

Ok since you called me something I need to respond to this.

Yes I am grateful for what is available. I myself are in possession of a book that date back to to the 1900s so yes I know what goes on about preservation but unfortunately the book got some holes in the pages from my own clumsiness.

Continuing on.
Some people cannot just get up and put gas in the car to take big long trip to a center just to view and capture the required information, that was clearly my problem if you had read the the top post in so in your view I am not going to be ever have that information.

I have done my time in front of a micro film reader to the read 1940s editions of the local paper so i know the ins and outs of preservation. I myself preserve this old information by studying it and incorporating it.

My post was observation of a whole thing as a whole, information is somewhat scant save for the few journals that open up their archives or websites. I am grateful for what is their but having a wider collection that is made freely may actually get people interested in the pipe organ and theater organ.

Or its probably the case of the spoiled millennial, take your pick.

[samibe]

Call them and see if they will scan and send you the info you need.

At my work, the majority of our information on old projects is hard copies in our archive (we finally went fully digital five-ish years ago). If anyone calls us looking for plans, we are more than happy to send them (if we already have pdfs), but if we have to retrieve them from the archive, scan, and then send them, that costs a lot and we usually have to bill that. We would like to scan everything in the archive, but some of the projects would take a whole day to scan and we only get one or two calls a year asking for pdf copies of the project plans. In our case the demand is so low it's hard to justify the amount of work it would take to digitize everything.

[Ben Madison]

Did, called up and they did not.

[Nutball]

Maybe start some sort of fund and organization for the purpose of seeking out and digitizing old pipe organ archives. Sometimes you just have to do it yourself. I'm very thankful for all who have made lots of useful software available for FREE, let a lone all the ones requiring a small fee to use it. I can only imagine the time it takes to do things like that.

[KC9UDX]

"Some people cannot just get up and put gas in the car to take big long trip to a center just to view and capture the required information"

You do get what you pay for.

This reminds me of having out of state buyers show up to buy car parts from my Craigslist ads. They always feel I owe them a deep discount because they came from so far away!

[Leisesturm]

I have strong opinions on how useful it is to study things like scaling information on specific organs from generations ago. I mostly keep them to myself. When those whose fascination with the long ago past reaches a fever pitch and they attempt to shame me into giving money towards the cause of making dormant information into active data I am moved to climb upon my own soapbox and opine. To wit: It is 2019. The future of pipe organs, pianos, even accordions, is DIGITAL. I'm sorry, that is simply the way it is. Blame the incredible loss of net worth in the Middle Class, or blame the passage of time and the advance of sophistication in matters electronic, but no matter the reason, it simply cannot be considered worth the effort to restore every single jot of data regarding extant pipe instruments back to public relevance. As if it ever was relevant. It wasn't.

Organ building is part art, part science. The science part of it can be duplicated by anyone with the relevant background. The art of it can never be duplicated. However, a sufficiently talented artist will not worry about that. They will create their own unique version of a particular form. Bach studied manuscripts of Buxtehude, Vivaldi and probably others we have no knowledge of. He did not need to study the manuscripts of every single composer living and dead to be Bach. I submit that there is way more information about how to build a successful pipe organ already at hand than any organbuilder needs. Plenty of examples in service to visit in person and measure with calipers and laser rulers. The rest is simply boredom. No, that's too harsh ... how about we call it ... the striving after knowledge for its own sake. In another setting this would be worthy of praise. In the particular niche of the organbuilding world ... well ... it probably is known to a high degree of precision how many significant pipe organs were built last year in the U.S. I am thinking the number was less than 50.

Well, that's my opinion. The reader may differ, of course. And they are free to try and obtain the information they want by any means necessary. I do have to point out the pointlessness of expecting the organ community to share their zeal for archived information and mount an organized attempt to locate and collate dormant archives. I will also say this in closing, back before my Epiphany as to the future of organ-building I had occasions to correspond with C.B Fisk, Schoenstein and Sons, Austin and others. I can't find them now but I have console layouts, specifications, all kinds of data on the instruments built by these firms. All of it free, all of it amazing in detail and scope and absolutely there were dead ends of research with companies that never responded to inquiries. It happens. I can't support as strong a reaction to a lack of cooperation by the builder of any single instrument. Sod them. Move on.

[Ben Madison]

i have to admit that is a very insightful answer.