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Reported by Antony Gordon

Monday July 19, 16:15 - 17:45
Thursday July 22, 14:15 - 15:45

We were all, no doubt, sad not to see Sister Blanche at this conference, but I'm most pleased to be able to report that there are other adventurers here with tales to enthral us.

I'm thinking particularly of the story of Der Ring des IAMLungen. We spend our lives deep in IAMLheim, hammering away to produce gold for our users - some of whom seem quite unable to recognize it as such.

By clever use of his Tarnhelm to assist in the disguise, Antony Gordon chaired both sessions in the place of Thomas Gerwin who was unable to be in Wellington. At the first session on Tuesday, we met two Rhinemaidens in the person of Peter Downes (a performing arts historian) and Jonathan Dennis (a freelance producer). They revealed to us some of their gold in the shape of reissued treasures of New Zealand recordings from the earlier part of the century featuring the artists: Rosina Buckman, Frances Alda, Ana Hato, and The Tahiwis. Following them, Antony Gordon briefly casting off his Tarnhelm revealed some treasures of Australasian music in the British Library National Sound Archive. The group photograph of delegates then intervened and the Tarnhelm proved itself not entirely effective at masking identity.

In the second session on Thursday, Timothy Maloney from the National Library of Canada displayed some Canadian gold – freshly polished up and on display to the world at large in the National Library of Canada's Virtual Gramophone digitization project. This project has placed digitized sound and images of disc labels from early Berliner discs on the web for all to hear and see.

Following this, Mary O'Mara (University of Queensland) and Gordon Abbott (University of Adelaide) showed us how to use the web to find lots more gold, in a very useful presentation describing how to find sources of audio on the web.

So, at the end of this week, it's quite clear that we have some gold, but ... will it be sufficient to build Valhalla? Perhaps next year we shall see.