You Ain’t Seen Nothin Yet*

First off let’s set the record (no pun intended) straight. The library loves technology. We offer streaming audio, we check out music CDs, we have migrated the library tour from cassette tapes to CDs to MP3 players and now you can use your smart phone to grab QR codes and follow the tour that way. So just because we are writing about vinyl don’t think we are behind the times. Seriously, we can send music right to your phone. We are so beyond hip.

With that out of the way we can look at LPs, albums, phonograph records, vinyl, you know what we are talking about. The big discs that people played when they wanted to listen to music up until the 1980s or so. The things modern school kids call big CDs. The library has thousands of them. And guess what (not to be confused with The Guess Who), you can listen to them—for free.

If you go to room 4432 on level 4 and ask at the desk the library staff will show you the room (Hint, ask for The Music Recordings Archive) where we keep our stacks of tracks.

There is a slight catch, you can’t take the records home–but we also offer turntables in the music listening room, a.k.a the Music and Dance Media Lab .

The variety of content is amazing. Sure we have opera and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. But there is great vintage stuff like Herman’s Hermits and early Donny and Marie. Fanboys can listen to Rush and dream about the Fender guitar on display. (There is even some Pink Floyd. If you drop the needle on Dark Side of the Moon we hope you don’t get to freaked out by the similarity of the library’s atrium and the albums cover art.)

Vinyl trivia: The first CD to sell over a million copies was Dire Straits Brothers in Arms. If you are curious, we have the vinyl record version so you can listen to what everyone else missed out on.

*You Ain’t Seen Nothin Yet is a song by the James Gang.