Impressive...
A few weeks ago a link to The Greatest Music Collection floated around the WRUW mailing lists. It contains 3 million unique records in a variety of formats, plus an unspecified number of duplicates. The guy who put it together assembled the collection over fifty years and kept it in a climate controlled warehouse in Pittsburgh.
6 million records is a lot of records. Many of the people reading this have seen the collection at WRUW. We bill that as the largest record library in Northeast Ohio, a claim that I am absolutely certain is correct. A few years ago I was the Record Librarian at WRUW, and my rough estimate was that our collection at that time had about 75,000 CDs and about 100,000 records. Let's call it 200,000 items total. That's pretty respectable; based on a news article I read when I was in Melbourne it's larger than any record library in Australia, to cite just one example. One of my friends from the station has about 30,000 records in his personal collection, which I'm sure is by far the largest personal collection of anyone I know. I've got more than most people and I'm not even at 500 yet. Heck, according to this article the Library of Congress only has 1 million items in its music collection. This collection is fifteen times larger than WRUW's collection, and unlike our library it appears to be in nearly pristine condition.
Paul Mawhinney, the guy who collected this, is not surprisingly the author of one of the definitive works on collecting records. According to the site his wife made him move the records out of their house when he hit the 160,000 mark. He's trying (or perhaps by now has succeeded) to sell the collection to a group that will keep it intact. If was a billionaire I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
6 million records is a lot of records. Many of the people reading this have seen the collection at WRUW. We bill that as the largest record library in Northeast Ohio, a claim that I am absolutely certain is correct. A few years ago I was the Record Librarian at WRUW, and my rough estimate was that our collection at that time had about 75,000 CDs and about 100,000 records. Let's call it 200,000 items total. That's pretty respectable; based on a news article I read when I was in Melbourne it's larger than any record library in Australia, to cite just one example. One of my friends from the station has about 30,000 records in his personal collection, which I'm sure is by far the largest personal collection of anyone I know. I've got more than most people and I'm not even at 500 yet. Heck, according to this article the Library of Congress only has 1 million items in its music collection. This collection is fifteen times larger than WRUW's collection, and unlike our library it appears to be in nearly pristine condition.
Paul Mawhinney, the guy who collected this, is not surprisingly the author of one of the definitive works on collecting records. According to the site his wife made him move the records out of their house when he hit the 160,000 mark. He's trying (or perhaps by now has succeeded) to sell the collection to a group that will keep it intact. If was a billionaire I'd buy it in a heartbeat.