As much as I love
The Internet Archive for it's vast collection of digitized 78's, it can be a bit frustrating at times. For instance, their search engine can be a bit wonky, and doesn't often work the way you think it might. But in the case of these records, it's not really their fault. They can only digitize the records they have, and those records are donated by normal people like you and me. So sometimes there's a record missing or a damaged side, leaving an incomplete set. All the records in today's share are parts of incomplete sets. Can you imagine how excited I was to see a Christmas record from
Elsie, the milk cow spokesperson for Borden? (At first I confused her with the cow on Elmer's Glue, but that confusion didn't last long...Turns out that
Elmer is Elsie's husband. And they have kids!) That excitement was tempered by the fact that the only record shared appeared to be sides 2 & 3. I can only hope that the other record shows up at some point, and I get to hear more singing cow tunes! The record shown at the bottom is probably an even worse case. Only one side of the record was playable, so in that case I have to wait for another copy of the same record to show up. To be honest, I've seen many cases of that turn up in the archive, but with more common records, it happens a lot. The older a record is, and the more esoteric (cows singing?), the less likely a second copy is going to show up, or at least the longer it takes. I believe there was a
Frank Luther album earlier in the season that was missing a record, too, so don't think it's a phenomena that's limited to just these fives sides out of the thousand I've shared this season. Anyhow, if you want to skip these because they're incomplete, I don't mind. Someday the records needed to complete these sets will turn up, and then you can hopefully download the whole thing. Who knows, maybe the missing records are in my collection, and I don't even know it. In the next month or so, I hope to box up all my 78s and the fine folks from the Internet Archive are going to haul them off to their processing center and start digitizing. I'm excited to see, and hear, what all I actually own. Come on, Elsie!!
MEGA
