The Grammy Foundation recently awarded Edith Garland Dupré Library a grant of $29,456 to catalog and enhance access to materials in the library's Cajun and Creole Music Collection.
The funds will be used to create catalog records for the music collection that will be accessible to scholars around the world through the library's online catalog. Many of the materials in the Cajun and Creole Music Collection require original cataloging, as they are unique pieces that have never been fully cataloged by any library.
Key personnel for the project are Sandy Himel, project director of the Cajun and Creole Music Collection; Danny Gillane, development and gifts librarian and Denise Goetting, cataloging librarian.
In 2003, Dupré Library began building the Cajun and Creole Music Collection with a Louisiana Board of Regent's Support Fund, traditional Enhancement Grant.
The collection consists mostly of commercially produced recordings and materials related to the music of the Cajuns and Creoles of Louisiana. The recordings, published since 1928, cover the history and the evolution in the Cajun and Creole musical cultures. Formats include both analog and digital media: 78 rpm, 45 rpm, and LP (33 1/3 rpm) records, 8-track tapes, audiocassettes, compact discs, VHS tapes and DVDs. The expanding collection also contains selected field recordings, books, periodicals, photographs and artifacts.
In addition, Dupr é Library will benefit from a Grammy Foundation grant awarded to Jerry Embree, audio engineer and musician, who plans to donate his collection of radio transcription recordings to the Cajun and Creole Music Collection.
His donation will include two radio series, the Creole Gumbo Radio Show and South to Louisiana: a Cajun and Zydeco Music Show, which were distributed over the national public radio satellite network in the early and mid 1990s. Embree's grant will allow him to compile and archive his recordings in a more stable media before donating them to the library.