It appears that the Montreal offices of Radio-Canada will be destroying over 151,000 compact discs from their library to save space according to Radio-Canada International.
These recordings will be copied to a digital format by 2019, just before the french public broadcaster’s move to a new smaller building in 2020. And only around 56,000 compact discs from their extensive collection will be offered to cultural or educational organizations.
When asked why all of the recordings could not be sold or given away, a spokeswoman for Radio-Canada stated it would have been too expensive and time consuming to confirm what rights were involved, although one has to wonder about this excuse because of the early 2012 sale of Calgary’s CBC music archive to The Inner Sleeve, a Calgary Record store in March 2012.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation sold 27,000 LPs and 35,000 CDs in that transaction and several other archives were closed since early 2012 because these were basically duplicates of the archive in Toronto.
Of the 650,000 compact discs contained at these archives in 2012, only 140,000 were “unique to one particular library” according to Exclaim. And some archivists and audiophiles are concerned about the potential loss of rare recordings in the process.
It’s a shame they couldn’t have simply forwarded Cancon recordings to Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa. But according to the CBC and Radio-Canada these were cost cutting measures…