 And then of course I'm seeing a really powerful looking woman in a genre that is typically known for men. And so there right there is this huge research question for people to dig into. Well, a question that I think is really interesting just to throw it back to you is to think about why are the genres of jazz and R&B and even gospel part of our collective knowledge and our cultural understanding of the musical cultures of New Orleans, but less so rap and hip hop. It's so important as a cultural expression. So in terms of its relationships, I think one of the things that I've noticed just sort of looking through our collections is seeing the names on some of our albums. And so we have set a fairly large collection of local artists from the 90s and early 2000s. And as I look at their names on those albums, I'm like, I know that name, but I know them from other genres that we have in our collections. So they might also be in a brass band or we might see their names popping up across areas. But as we also think about how music is generated, they're all really intrinsic expressions of our local culture. So it's really, really deep in the local culture. And you're gonna start seeing those influences come out across all the genres. When you think of the brass bands, there are brass bands that are very specific to different wards even. And when you look at the hip hop, you'll see that as well. I was just sort of glancing over my shoulder at some of these and I was just, my attention was captured by this album, by the twins. And the image in the background is St. Rock Market, which if we know today, it still exists. It's undergone a lot of renovation since this photo and this album was released in 2010. But it's just sort of having this particular image places these artists in that very specific community. So if it were mostly local artists, especially local artists that are really hard to get ahold of their albums, I would probably absolutely love to put it in our collection here at Tulane, but I might put limitations on its circulation. So I might try to limit access so that people can listen to it, but they have to listen to it here in the library. And I would be doing that primarily to try and protect the copyright and intellectual property rights of the original creators. The mixtape as a concept is just this amazing cultural artifact as it is, right? It's like this whole ethos and cultural way of music consumption. So just thinking about that mixtape as its own object is like so many things you can do with it as a research object, but then also as an artifact that carries local music, that access point is gonna be really, really important. Yes for growth, but with some parameters and limits. So when I say yes for growth, just the literature and the research that's being produced right now is just exploding. Like I was just looking for some books to pull because they're amazing. And I think I saw 10 of them are going through our cataloging process, which means we just bought them, they were just released, they'll be in ourselves soon, which is great. So we can continue purchasing books and we'll find more and more research articles about rap and hip hop culture in our collections, which is fabulous. The possibility for collecting sound recordings, that's where I'm like, yes, but with limitations a little bit. So when I came in in 2009, it took me a little while to figure out where I was in the town I was living in. But by like 2010, 2011, I was like, we don't have any of these local albums in our collection. So then I was able to sort of retrospectively purchase some releases from the 1990s. They were on CD, so it was easy for me to get. But then like around 2013, 2014, when I started looking for contemporary releases, what I was discovering is so many of them were digital downloads, which makes a lot of sense. It's just money sense for the creators. It's way more economical for people to be releasing digital downloads rather than printing CDs that they may or may not be able to sell. So they're releasing to digital downloads. It also made it more available for the average person, which was their primary audience. So when you look at the licenses for digital downloads, it's very much so about making it available only for an individual user. You can't share it. You can't host it on your own streaming platform. And so that really puts up a huge barrier for libraries, especially academic libraries, to be able not only to purchase them, but to be able to provide access to the community, mostly the two-lane community and whenever possible, the broader community as well. That's a really good question because like so very few people actually have a CD player anymore. I think a lot of today's students have probably never even listened to a CD, nevermind held one. I do still purchase CDs. I'm just gonna pull this one out. It's such a great example. And so there are a couple reasons why I buy CDs. One is, again, sort of comes down to the licensing issue that I mentioned earlier when you have digital releases. Those licenses that come with them sort of make them inaccessible for libraries or libraries become ineligible. If I can get a physical CD, then I totally will. And I get them for reasons like this insert. This is a really skinny insert. It's just one page back in front. But just looking at this, I get so much information from it. This is for Katrinaville Entertainment. So what was going on in the culture at the time when they're saying Katrinaville, right? This was produced in 2010, just five years after Hurricane Katrina. So you're seeing sort of the cultural response to that really catastrophic event. I'm seeing images of, again, like the same rock market and seeing how it's changed over time in that particular neighborhood. And then, of course, I'm seeing a really powerful-looking woman in a genre that is typically known for men. It's hard for a woman to break in. So this is raising all kinds of questions of where are the women? Who are the women historically in Orleans hip hop? And so there right there is this huge research question for people to dig into. When I buy CDs now, partly for these friends, there's so much information in them. But also when I'm purchasing them, nowadays I'm mostly focusing, as best I can, on local content, or I'm focusing on releases that seem to have a really, really significant cultural moment. So that seemed to have really gotten people locally and sort of nationally talking about something. When NASAC sort of broke into the field, I need his albums because he was so pivotal. There was a changing moment in music and genre around his break-in album. So we should have that album in our collection, for example. I do still purchase classical music. The base of our collection actually started in the music department. It was originally intended to support the teaching and learning and research of music, which historically had been focused on classical European-centered music that has clearly shifted dramatically over time. So now if you look at a lot of the classes, we still have all of those classes, but we also have contemporary composition. So there's a lot of electronic music, experimental music. When those are available on CD, I will buy them. So there was a release, it's called One-Bit Symphony. It's not a CD, it's a bunch of little electrical wires and a little dime battery and a button and a dial. We have that in our collection. It's sort of cool, right? It's awesome. My collections here at Howard Titt and Memorial Library, they're focused on materials that are just commercially available. If they got lost or broken because life, it's not gonna be a tremendous loss to our cultural heritage and our cultural memory. They're there for people to enjoy. They're there for people to conduct their research. They're available for anybody trying to understand the broader local history, right? And our cultural heritage. So if you're looking for really contemporary music that's only available online, actually the New Orleans Public Library has a really fabulous program and you can stream local artists. And in fact, if you all know any local hip hop artists, you should really advocate for them. They're not already to submit their work to that local collection because it's voluntary, it's opt-in. And so what people can see in that New Orleans music collection, people might mistakenly think, oh, that is all of New Orleans music just because there are so many absences. So people really need to go in and get their music in there to be sure all of New Orleans musical culture is really represented in there. Where archives are specifically important is they can sort of reach deeper into the culture than I'm able to do with just these commercial releases. If they have the capacity, then they can also get some of the unreleased albums a little bit more easily than I can. They can get the notes if they're in a handwritten notes or communications. And Amistad Research Center, which is technically not a part of Tulane, it's an independent archive, but they are on the Tulane University campus. They are home to the NOLA Hip Hop Archive. It's amazing, everybody should Google it. It's just NOLA Hip Hop Archive. There's a whole online digital platform that features interviews that they did maybe 10 or more years ago with really important and significant local hip hop artists. You're not gonna find those anywhere else. So that's a really amazing way that archives can go and talk to people in the community and capture their stories. And with their permission, make those stories available for the broader world. It's amazing. If you wanted to sort of expand more broadly to try and place where does New Orleans hip hop fit in the broader national view, then people can look out to Cornell. They have an amazing hip hop archive. They're one of the first that I'm aware of to really dig into archiving and documenting hip hop culture in the Northeast region. It's really amazing collection.