EDVR: Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings

  • Mr Samuel Brylawski, University of California Santa Barbara, United States
  • The University of California Santa Barbara is developing a comprehensive discography of all 78­rpm recordings by the Victor record companies in the United States. The discography covers activities from 1900 through 1950, over 160,000 master recordings. Unissued as well as issued takes are documented. The discography is available on the web, free of charge.

    This paper reviews the history of the project, which began 45 years ago as a collaboration between two private record collectors who intended the work to be comprised of over 40 individual book volumes, its development by UCSB as a database, and the process by which the work is now developed. Information for the discography is gathered from company files and trade catalogs, and is supplemented and verified by research of private collectors, institutional cataloging, and examination of recordings. Unique to this project are its scope, inclusion of information rarely found in discographies, utilization of standardized names and titles, sourcing of data, and potential as a tool to link to library databases to locate actual recordings for audition.

    EDVR began its life as a research work created by expert hobbyists. As developed by librarians and discographers, and offered free on the web, it is intended to be of value to libraries and archives, scholars, and the collecting community. Discussion of the future of EDVR will include how it might link with national discographies, be expanded to include other record labels, and evolve into a discovery tool for digitized audio files.