Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings

About EDVR

The Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings (EDVR) is an index to master recordings (matrixes) and published discs made by the Victor Talking Machine Company beginning in 1900.

The database is edited by a team of researchers based at the University of California, Santa Barbara Libraries. It includes master recordings made by Victor in the United States and Central and South America, releases derived from masters recorded in Europe by the Gramophone Company, and trial recordings of new artists and sessions from which no discs were issued.

Approximately 1,000 new master recordings are added to the database monthly and the database will eventually extend to the end of the 78rpm era in the early 1950s.

 

Click here for more information about EDVR

What We're Working On

We add content to the EDVR weekly. Domestic masters for more than 20 years of Victor activities are online. Presently, we're working on editing recording sessions of the early 1920s. We're also adding records from Victor's Latin America field trips of 1905 through 1915.

We have ended the test period of the discography website and made several improvements to the site based on user feedback. The feedback received from our initial users has been invaluable. We continue to try improve our interface to be as powerful and simple to use as possible.

We've added a tool to search OCLC's WorldCat from the screen of any released disc. We hope that this will assist users in finding these recordings at a nearby library.

News and Updates

Update

Recently, I've been making changes to the locations of very early recording sessions. Victor expert John Bolig questioned why we set so many early 1900s sessions in Camden, and not Philadelphia. He reminded me of the research conducted by Allan Sutton at Mainspring Press and of the entries in the memoirs written by the Sooy brothers, Raymond and Harry, both early employees of Victor Talking Machine Company. Harry O. Sooy's "Memoir of my Career at Victor Talking Machine Company"  notes that Victor's "laboratory,"  as they called their recording studio in the early days, moved from Camden to Philadelphia in September of 1901. He puts it at the middle of the month. I noted a gap in recording activities between Sept. 14 and Oct. 5, 1901 so we're speculating that all recordings made prior to Sept. 15 were made in Camden, NJ.

Raymond Sooy's "Memoirs of my Recording and Traveling Experiences for the Victor Talking Machine Company" states that they moved recording activities back to Camden the week of November 25, 1907. Our Victor data bears out Sooy's date. After Nov. 22, 1907, there are no domestic recording sessions until Dec. 9, 1907.

So, on the basis of these leads and evidence in the data, we recently changed the recording locations of nearly every pre-1908 session. Still, unless we saw a specific location noted in Victor ledgers, you'll find "unconfirmed" by most place names in that era.

The capability to revisit these records makes me grateful that this is a dynamic, online project. Three of the advantages of an online, as opposed to print, reference source are: a) we are able to offer it free of charge; b) there are fewer constraints on the amount and detail of content, with no paper or printing costs; and c) our inevitable errors need not exist for all time to haunt us. Unfortunately, large reference resources such as EDVR are bound to include errors, because of inaccessible or nonexistent sources, errors in sources, and, of course, mistakes in editing. We revise EDVR entries constantly to incorporate information contributed by users, add information found in new sources, and fix our mistakes.

Posted by Sam Brylawski on May 6th, 2009

Click here to read more news

What's Online

This website currently has the following available for searching, browsing, and commenting:

38,304 Matrix records, 13,750 Names, 30,613 Discs

Domestic Victor matrix editing completed through December 31st, 1921