Toronto Reference Library gets in on vinyl craze, buys 100 records

For librarian and vinyl fan Beau Levitt, choosing which albums to buy - including Drake, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Arcade Fire - was a dream job.

Thestar.com
June 22, 2017
By Laura Howells

Who says libraries aren’t hip?

The Toronto Reference Library is kicking it old school, buying vinyl records for the first time in three decades. The library is adding 100 titles.

It already has more than 15,000 vinyl records on its shelves, but it has not added anything since the 1980s, so there were some notable gaps in its collection.

As vinyl enjoys a revival, the library decided to give it another spin.

Now Snoop Dogg, Feist, David Bowie and Drake are among the artists you can hear on turntables there. You can’t take the albums home, but there are two record players on the fifth floor, free for anyone to use.

For librarian Beau Levitt, getting to choose which records to buy was “kind of a dream job,” albeit a tough one. They started by splitting their shopping list into four categories: rock/pop, jazz, hip hop/R&B and Canadian music.

“We wanted to cast the net as wide as we could and beef up some of the areas we were sparse in,” said Levitt, adding they were missing some major musical players.

There was no hip hop or R&B, for instance, and the collection lacked giants like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
Levitt said it was hard to narrow down his choices, especially in under-represented genres. But there were also limitations; he could only buy records that were still in print. This excluded hip hop classics such as “3 Feet High and Rising” by De La Soul, he said.

Levitt relied on his personal knowledge to make selections, but also consulted reference books, colleagues and friends.

The existing jazz collection was somewhat obscure, he said, so he added standards such as Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.

In the Canadian category, Levitt tried to go for albums and artists that have won the Polaris Music Prize. The 25 new Canadian picks include Up To Here by The Tragically Hip, Power In The Blood by Buffy Sainte-Marie, Funeral by Arcade Fire, and Drake’s Take Care.

If you didn’t know the library carried vinyl, you’re not alone; Levitt worked for the Toronto Public Library system for eight years before stumbling across the collection on the website.

“I thought it was amazing. I just about lost my mind,” said Levitt, who fell in love with vinyl in the late ’90s.

Decades ago, every branch of the Toronto Public Library had vinyl records, which people could check out and take home.

But as CDs rose to power, vinyl disappeared at all branches but the Reference Library.

The older vinyl collection is “pretty diverse and pretty random,” said Levitt. “There’s a lot of one-off, oddball kind of stuff.”

There’s a 1982 recording of buskers in the TTC, for example, called Music for Subways. There’s the LP of a Toronto experimental synth band that only had one live performance. There are vinyl recordings of Great British Speeches and of Che Guevara.

Levitt said the library decided to buy new vinyl based on resurgent interest in the medium, as well as the popularity of the Toronto Public Library’s “Vinyl 101” workshops in 2015.

Vinyl is popular just now in North America. In the United States, vinyl revenues are the highest they’ve been since 1988, according to data from the Recording Industry Association of America. In 2015, vinyl sales jumped by 30 per cent in Canada, then another 29 per cent in 2016, according to Nielsen Music Canada.

While sales are down so far in 2017, Paul Shaver, head of Nielsen Music Canada, thinks the vinyl revival is far from over.

“It’s becoming more and more accessible and I don’t think that’s going to stop anytime soon,” said Shaver.

The reference library’s vinyl collection isn’t complete yet; Levitt says that the library plans to buy about 100 new records a year.