Filip Šír
National Musem

The paper describes the present and plans in the field of creating sound documents databases. These e-sources brings important informations not for musicologist and musicians only, but it is study and research support for history, theatre, film music, oral history, voice recording, sound industry etc.

As a first we will speak about the Virtual national phonotheque, which is at the stage of significant change. After period of longer stagnation new renaissance is coming.

The second very interesting source is an international database Bibliography of Discographies. This amazing project started in 2016 and arises after patronage of Discography Committee of IASA thanks to Filip Šír (the chair of the DC) and Peter Laurence from Harvard University – Library Eda Kuhna.

Further information will bring about two planned outputs to be come up in the frame of NAKI II project New Phonograph in National Museum in Prague. The first one is the National discographic database, the second one a specialised sound portal.

Filip Šír joined the National Museum in Prague, Czech Republic in 2015 after his work for The Moravian Library, when he established sound lab with specialization to shellac and vinyl discs. Now, he is building new sound labs for National Museum and also preparing a digitisation strategy of sound documents in the Czech Republic. In cooperation with private collector Gabriel Gössel, Filip published a discography about first Czech record label company ESTA and two new publications on its way focused on sound industry Recorded Sound in Czech Lands 1900–1946 and Grammar of gramophone record labels: an aid for cataloguing historical records from 1900 to 1946. Further, together with colleagues from Brno, he prepared a recommendation on digitizing gramophone records for Czech memory institutions. In cooperation with Masaryk University in Brno he leads collecting information on old sound recordings collections in Czech Republic and Slovakia. The aim is to incorporate them into the Virtual National Phonotheque portal. Studied the Higher Professional School of Information Services in Prague and LIS at Charles University. Besides, he leads the group of people dealing with issues of audio documents in Czech Republic. Filip is kind of pathfinder of sound documents preservation in his country.