Year: Day to Day Men: January 27
Magic Mirror
On the twenty-seventh of January in 2003, the first fifty sound recordings for preservation in the National Recording Registry were announced by James Billington, the Librarian of Congress. This registry was established by the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000, which created the National Recording Preservation Board with membership appointed by the Librarian of Congress. Its members select the recordings for preservation on a yearly basis from a list of nominations.
The National Recording Preservation Act established a national program to guard and preserve America’s sound recording heritage. Recordings and collections of recordings to be preserved and maintained must meet the criteria for selection:
Recordings must be culturally, historically or aesthetically significant and/or inform or reflect culture in the United State.
Recordings will not be considered for inclusion in the Registry if no copy of the recording exists.
No recording is eligible for inclusion until ten years after the recording’s creation.
For the years 2003 to 2006, the National Recording Preservation Board selected fifty recordings for the Registry; in the following years, twenty-five have been selected each year. Public nominations are accepted for inclusion in each calendar year and are announced the following spring. Registry title works, either original or copies, are housed at the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus for Audio Video Conservation in Culpeper, Virginia. Among each year’s selections are a few recordings of significance that are housed in the National Archive’s audiovisual collection.
Among the six hundred and twenty-five recordings preserved in the Registry are:
—Jesse Walker Fewkes’s 1890 Pasamaquoddy Indians Field Recordings
—Scott Joplin’s 1916 Ragtime Compositions (Piano Rolls)
—George Gershwin’s 1924 Rhapsody in Blue
—Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933-1944 Fireside Chats Radio Broadcasts
—Abbott and Costello October 6, 1938 “Who’s on First” Radio Broadcast
—James Brown and The Famous Flames 1963 Live at the Apollo
—Russ Hodges’s Coverage of the October 3rd, 1951 National League Tiebreaker; New York Giants vs Brooklyn Dodgers