Digitizing The Bruckner Archive "Charter Oak" Series

Digitizing The Bruckner Archive "Charter Oak" Series
Abruckner.com has completed a project of digitizing all 2,140 recordings once held as recordable compact discs in the "Charter Oak" series.

The "Charter Oak" or "COR" series of compact discs consists of recordings that were never commercially released on CD. The series includes airchecks, concert recordings, transcriptions of out-of-print LPs, 78s. cassettes, open reel tapes and some in-audience recordings.

Unlike all commercially produced CDs, LPs, 78s, cassettes and videos, the "Charter Oak" series of recordings will be donated to the Austrian National Library in Vienna as a collection of lossless digital files stored on an external hard drive. The commercially produced recordings will be donated to the library in their original form.

This action guarantees that the Bruckner Archive will continue to have space for the growing collection of commercial CDs, SACDs and videos that are being released. The "Charter Oak" series will continue to grow at a rate of twenty recordings per month, but space considerations will no longer be a factor.

This places the "Charter Oak" series in a format much easier to transport (one hard drive vs. 2,100+ CDRs) and in a format much more conducive for preservation. The "Charter Oak" series is already backed up on three hard drives and one off-site server.

This extensive project is part of the mission of Abruckner.com which is to promote and disseminate information about the life and music of Anton Bruckner, maintain a comprehensive discography of Bruckner's orchestral music, and administer an archive of Bruckner recordings which will eventually be transferred to the Austrian National Library in Vienna.