News and Tips

We’d like to thank everyone for their attendance at last Friday’s party in honor of Bill Schurk’s 40th anniversary working at the University Libraries. It was delightful to see how many people made the effort to be here from near and far, and we hope you had as much fun as we did. Here’s to your next 40, Bill!

Obviously, this year marks not only an important anniversary for Bill Schurk, the ML/SRA, and the University Libraries, but it’s also the anniversary of the Summer of Love, a watershed of popular music. We neglected to remind you to celebrate Sgt. Pepper‘s 40th anniversary on June 1, but we won’t make that mistake again and will remind you about the Monterey Pop Festival which took place June 16-18, 1967.

The festival included a huge lineup of established and emerging musicians and made a name for many. Artists included Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Mamas and the Papas, Jefferson Airplane, the Byrds, the Who, Ravi Shankar, Hugh Masekela, the Grateful Dead, and many, many others.

So stop by the ML/SRA this summer, listen to some of these tunes, revisit this iconic event, and celebrate at least a little.

This Saturday, BGSU University Libraries will be celebrating the 40th anniversary of the William T. Jerome Library, the building that houses most of the University Libraries’ collections, including the Music Library and Sound Recordings Archives.

2007 marks not only the anniversary of Jerome Library, but the 40th anniversary of the Sound Recordings Archives and the employment of Bill Schurk as BGSU’s Sound Recordings Archivist as well. In July of 1967, Bill was hired at BGSU to begin building collections in support of the sound recording needs of University departments outside of Music. Bill spent the next year collecting materials and setting up the listening equipment for what was then called The Audio Center.

The Audio Center opened in July 1968… At its opening, the center’s holdings included more than two thousand recordings of speeches, plays, and a wide variety of popular music. Initial holdings came from purchases, duplicates from Schurk’s personal collection, and donations from area radio stations. The audio technology was representative of the era, consisting of a central control booth from which selections could be played for up to twenty-four students seated at remote listening stations. In addition to audio materials, the center’s collections also included print materials-such as periodicals, catalogs, and discographies-related to the sound-recording industry (Boettcher and Schurk, p. 850).

That same year, Bill also began gathering materials for the Popular Culture Library, which later branched out into its own, separate, collection, The Browne Popular Culture Library. Since those early days, the Archives have grown exponentially with numbers of sound recordings now approaching one million. The SRA’s primary focus now is on popular music; the Archives currently represent the largest collection of popular music recordings in an academic library in North America, if not the world.

Over the years, many things have changed in the collection, but Bill has remained a constant. Through a number of mergers and reorganizations, he still serves as Sound Recordings Archivist and works enthusiastically to build the Archives, visiting resale shops and used records stores daily to find rare gems that don’t exist in any other library collection. He strives to provide detailed cataloging records that offer our users unique access to these materials. Classes across campus regularly visit the ML/SRA for Bill’s lectures on topics varying from use of discographies to overviews of specific sources, both print and audio, on any given topic. And Bill can always be counted on to provide appropriate and oh-so-entertaining music for library events. Not only does he work tirelessly to build, maintain, and promote the collections, he is also a most delightful co-worker, and we all feel very fortunate to see him every day.

While looking back on the past 40 years of Jerome Library, please join us in recognizing this landmark year in our own collection and Bill’s tenure here at BGSU.

For further reading on the history of the Music Library and Sound Recordings Archives, please see the Notes article by Bill and former head of the ML/SRA Bonna Boettcher:

Boettcher, Bonna J. and William L. Schurk. “From Games to Grunge: Popular Culture Research Collections at Bowling Green State University.” Notes, 2nd Ser., 54, No. 4. (Jun., 1998): 849-859.