One of the founding fathers in the field of the protection of sound cultural heritage in Czech lands was the well-known international writer and playwright Karel Čapek.
Although it may sound somewhat dubious, Karel Čapek, as part of his enthusiasm for collecting at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, aggregated a collection of almost 500 gramophone records of popular, classical and folk music from all over the world. He can therefore rightly be regarded as a pioneer of the “national sound archive” movement. In the eighties, his collection was brought to the Náprstek Museum, and at the turn of the new millennium some recordings were made available to the public through the release of 6 CDs.
On the 19th September 2018 the New Phonograph team visited Náprstkovo Museum Library, where the Čapek sound collection was stored, in order to open a channel of collaboration with the library staff and to get acquainted with the storage and administration of the collection. In the future, the Čapek collection will be one of the cornerstones of development on which the project will be built, from their preservation to the digitization of their content.
As this situation surrounding the collection of Karel Čapek develops, we will be sure to inform you!
The New Phonograph team
