The proposed paper elucidates the work required to (pre-) describe, organize project team for, and promote of the sound collections held by various governmental institutes and public sectors in China. Specifically, the collections owned by many Chinese broadcasting stations and musical conservatories include recorded pieces on LPs, OTs, and cassettes that were created between 1950s and 1990s, and the content covers the full range of Chinese musical genres in terms of geography, linguistics, and cultures, including folksongs, folk instrumentals and ensembles, various traditional Chinese operas, and narrative singings. The collections also include music in Mongolian, Uyghur, Kazakh, Korean, and other “minority” languages in China. The Huayun Archives has become the key collaborator with these institutes, digitizing their collections and promoting the contents on our database, www.china1904.com.
I will first introduce the scale and significance of these sound collections. Over the past decade, our team at Huayun conducted preliminary research and (pre-) described the materials; then, based on the description, the team organized, initiated, and promoted the publication for the collection. Our work included locating of scholars and collaborators, seeking for institutional connections, and improving existing descriptions. To demystify the work for these collections, I will analyze the methods and principles of our work, with focus on selection of terminology, key words, and cross-references that facilitate the organizations and promotion of the digital repository. I argue that, it is critical to describe items with consideration of disparate factors, including accompanying texts, historical contexts, and non-musical expressive genres, in order to make archival items meaningful to diverse audiences, particularly the scholars and contributors who are later to be involved in a larger project frame.
