An Italian experience in collecting, preserving 78s Italian jazz records and how to ensure free access to our heritage music

This little note comes from a thirty-year experience of jazz record collecting in Italy, spent on the preservation and cataloguing of 78 rpm recordings dealing with the History of the Origins Italian Jazz.
In Italy, the preservation of 78 rpm disc heritage and its music is left entirely to the passion, sacrifice and dedication of private collectors. The amount of musical information to be protected, based not only upon my archive, is therefore large, and comprises of music catalogues, original scores, record covers, and photographs in addition to discs.
If not digitised, there exists a serious risk that, in the future, the uniqueness of this material will be dispersed, and all the pieces will be irretrievably lost to the heritage of Italian music and culture.
Hence, there exists a need for the general digital acquisition of every aspect concerning the original 78 rpm Italian recordings’ history present in each collection. The organization and dissemination of all the information can be achieved through the many aspects of the web (blogs, monographic or thematic web sites), with special attention to enabling the widest possible access through listening or downloading large music selections that are free, for the most part, from reproductive rights. In the absence of adequate funds, public institutions should still extensively support every effort coming from the private, by hosting lectures and films in their facilities, or by making provisions throughout their general experience of digitisation.
The results of this project may be entrusted to a number of local archives and media libraries, national and international networks, to be placed in the widest use.
More must be done in my country in order to nurture a general consciousness of the danger of loss of historical and cultural memory, but I hope that my warning can contribute to a greater commitment from all public institutions, and that the many collectors scattered around Italy can work together to pass on to younger generations the meaning of their life’s work.