Vernon's Vault of Vintage Vinyl

The International Bluegrass Music Museum, Owensboro, KY, hasa large vinyl album collection which is difficult to share withtheir world-wide community. While having a revolving exhibit ofalbum covers can provide a way to share the album's art withvisitors; they are still unable to share the music without possiblydamaging them and it does not enable the Museum to reach itsworld-wide audience of bluegrass fans. My solution to this problemhas two steps: create a computer database system with theinformation from each of these albums and to digitize the albums.The album information would be integrated with the digital soundrecordings to provide a comprehensive database of the Museum'salbum collection. I focus on the first step of this solution, thesteps taken to record all of the information from a portion of theMuseum's Vernon collection. I also examine bluegrass music as agenre, its history and origins, and discuss how bluegrass musicfits into society today and why it is important topreserve thisvital musical genre. This book will be useful to Museum staff whoare interested in using new technology to reach a wider audienceand to bluegrass fans around the world.