Record Registry Inducts Collection

As the weary and overworked march up to the fifth floor of Lamont Library poetry is very rarely on their minds—and even fewer know what lies within the wood-paneled George Edward Woodberry Poetry Room.

But a piece of the room—a collection of recordings bearing the Harvard Vocarium label—just obtained a bit of fame, inducted into the first annual National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress.

Other recordings inducted into the registry include the radio broadcast of the Hindenburg crash from 1937, Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 radio production of “War of the Worlds” and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech from 1963.

More than a half-century after the Harvard Vocarium put out its last record, the current status of the Poetry Room’s collection has suffered both from inevitable wear-and-tear and from lost titles.

But as part of its induction into the registry, the Harvard Vocarium will receive significant increases in preservation, restoration and digitization by both Harvard and the National Recording Preservation Board.

Frederick C. Packard Jr. ’20, a former assistant professor of public speaking, pushed Harvard to begin serious audio recording in the early part of the century, developing the Harvard Vocarium as a tool to produce quality speech recordings. By the 1920s, phonographic technology was growing to meet the demand for improved sound. The Vocarium launched as a record label in 1931.

A collaboration of the Poetry Room, the Harvard Film Service, the English Department and Packard, the Harvard Vocarium record label was motivated by the desire to “bring to life the voice of the poet,” according to Donald S. Share, the Woodberry’s curator.

“The poet’s voice could come to life with the kind of technology just coming into existence at that time,” he says. “[Packard] was a pioneer in speaking up for this kind of fieldwork.”

The plan to create an audio collection of poets and authors reciting their work was groundbreaking and well-received.

From 1931 until its demise in the early 1950s, the Harvard Vocarium produced roughly 110 records, issued catalogs of its available recordings and had fairly successful sales.

The list of literary luminaries the Vocarium attracted for recordings—including T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Tennessee Williams, Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore, Robert Lowel, Archibald MacLeish and Theodore Roethke—gained widespread attention.

And soon, other record companies followed suit.

Although the Harvard Vocarium did not outlast its creator’s retirement, Share says that Packard’s “pioneering vision”—using novel technology to enjoy and study literature as a “living voice”—set a bold example for the possibilities of combining technology with an art form.

This year, the Harvard Vocarium record label was honored by being selected one of only fifty inductees to the inaugural National Recording Registry.

Created by the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000, the National Recording Registry was established “to maintain and preserve sound recordings that are culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

The goals of Librarian of Congress James H. Billington in crafting the list are very similar to those of Packard.

“We have a great responsibility ahead of us: to assure the preservation and accessibility of over 100 years of recorded sound,” Bilard said two years ago at the National Recording Presevation Board’s first meeting. “The sounds of our times, and those of the 20th century, will be experienced first-hand by generations to come when we accomplish this important goal.”

The National Recording Registry begins at a time of heightened concern for the future of near-obsolete and rare forms of media.

In addition to housing a broad variety of printed poetry, the Woodberry Poetry Room serves as a repository for the spoken word. Harvard hosts numerous poetry readings each year, many of which are recorded and stored for posterity in Lamont—“a permanent record of these occasions,” according to Fearrington Libriarian of Houghton Library William P. Stoneman.

“You hate to make the decision that a person is not worth recording,” Stoneman says. “After all, it’s difficult to predict the future significance of a recording. So Harvard tries to record it all.”