Elizabeth Fuhrman Bragg

Vernon's Vault of Vintage Vinyl: Taking a Museum's Record Album Collection and Making It Accessible to the Public Elizabeth Fuhrman Bragg

The International Bluegrass Music Museum, Owensboro, KY, has a large vinyl album collection which is difficult to share with their world-wide community. While having a revolving exhibit of album covers can provide a way to share the album's art with visitors; they are still unable to share the music without possibly damaging them and it does not enable the Museum to reach its world-wide audience of bluegrass fans. My solution to this problem has two steps: create a computer database system with the information from each of these albums and to digitize the albums. The album information would be integrated with the digital sound recordings to provide a comprehensive database of the Museum's album collection. I focus on the first step of this solution, the steps taken to record all of the information from a portion of the Museum's Vernon collection. I also examine bluegrass music as a genre, its history and origins, and discuss how bluegrass music fits into society today and why it is important to preserve this vital musical genre. This book will be useful to Museum staff who are interested in using new technology to reach a wider audience and to bluegrass fans around the world.