Bob, when Dad died I spoke with several people and had some useful advice offered. Three different universities in the region have programs that would be good repositories--the University of Washington for one, and I think it was UBS where Phil housed his collection, and there is also a good program in Calgary. A little far away, but also one to consider. There is the more generalized music collection there at the Seattle Center/Worlds Fair site (I know Dad would cringe to think I donated his material to go in the same location as Jimi Hendrix, but hey, the world is changing).

The point is to not lose track of it in a dusty musty mildewy corner of your garage somewhere. Make your intents known to people and make arrangements for someone to do something with it if you don't get a chance to finish the work you're planning on.

I hope Art Thieme will notice this thread, because he has been doing exactly what you're talking about with his collection. He took about a year, I think, and put it all from cassettes and other media onto CDs.

If you donate a collection to someplace like a museum or university, they have tons of stuff, so unless you give them some money (an endowment) to move it to the front of the list, the collection might not be processed and available to the public and to researchers for a long time to come. So if there is a way to use some of the material in the collection to raise money for that endowment, I think you should explore the possibilities of permission and keeping it all legal and ethical.

I had started processing Dad's collection several years ago, and then we had a burglary here that threw all of that work into chaos. I was sidetracked, but have, through the process of de-cluttering the house (you've probably noticed that steady trickle of discussion down in the BS section) have been making a good workspace to resume that one of these days. And then I'll compare notes with you on recordings. We may have some duplicates, because I know people gave Dad tapes and I know he gave people copies.

SRS