Scientific Collections

Lautarchiv

Collections and catalog

Collections and catalog

The nucleus of the Sound Archives consists of around 4,500 shellac records (excluding duplicates; including duplicates: around 10,000 shellac records), of which some 3,800 are speech and over 700 are music recordings.

Due to wear and tear and to wartime losses the collections are, sadly, no longer complete. Duplicates were made of the records, so copies of the lost recordings probably still exist in other archives. We would be grateful for any information.

The following structure of sub-collections, arranged partly by media, partly by content and partly in chronological order, has been consolidated in recent years. Some recordings must be assigned to several of the sub-collection categories described here. The recordings in the database have yet to be assigned to the listed categories, so a database query by category is unfortunately not possible. In the history of the Sound Archives there are additional categories not listed here, such as linguistics and phonetics.

Not all of the items in the Sound Archives have been cataloged. At the same time the online catalog includes recordings that are listed and for which written documentation exists but that are considered to have been lost.