Archival Policy for Toby Simkin’s Archives
Thanks to my primary domain TobySimkin.com and its various iterations being one of the first website domains registered in the early 1990’s, my sites are extensively indexed by various services and robots including Bing, Google, Yandex, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, IndexNow, WolframAlpha, Weibo, Sina, Pinterest, Naver and so many more. As a result, much of my 1,000’s of pages of content may appear in first page results of most search engines automatically.
Further, specialized submissions of pertinent pages of my sites in both offline (typically PDF, but sometimes printed) and online (HTML, PHP and ASP) formats are made regularly to major collections, theatre archives, arts museums and more, with the objective of providing future researchers a thorough resource with an accurate snapshot of history, including (but not limited too) the following:
| USA Theatre Broadway Theatre |
NY Public Library Archive / Lincoln Center / Billy Rose Theatre Division The Billy Rose Theatre Division of The New York Public Library is one of the largest and most comprehensive archives devoted to the theatrical arts. The division is an indispensable resource for artists, writers, researchers, scholars, students, and the general public. Since 1970, they have preserved and documented the creative contributions of distinguished artists and legendary figures of the theatre. |
| USA Theatre Broadway Theatre USA Content |
The Smithsonian Archives The Smithsonian Institution was established in 1846 as an independent cultural and scientific resource to enrich the lives of the American people and advance the increase and diffusion of knowledge. The Smithsonian is a vast collection of both museums and archives covering just about every aspect of life within the USA. |
| Global Theatre | Google Arts & Culture / Google Cultural Institute Google Arts & Culture features content from thousands of museums and archives … with the Google Cultural Institute bringing the world’s treasures online. |
| Australian Theatre Australian Content |
The National Library of Australia The National Library of Australia aims to collect past and present stories. The Library holds the largest collection in the world of material about Australia that is of national significance documenting the lives and activities of Australian people, places and events that have shaped society. This includes the “trove” archive for digital collections. |
| Australian Theatre Credits | AUSSTAGE The Australian Live Performance Database, AusStage, provides an accessible online resource for researching live performance in Australia. Led by a consortium of universities, government agencies, industry organizations and collecting institutions with funding from the Australian Research Council and other sources and housed at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia. AusStage collects and shares information about Australian live performance as an ongoing, open-access and collaborative endeavor. |
| Australian Content | Australian Web Archive The Australian Web Archive (AWA) collects online publications including websites and other web documents. |
| Queensland Theatre Queensland Content |
State Library of Queensland (John Oxley Library) Collecting heritage and resources produced by Queenslanders, with an emphasis on preserving online content considered authoritative, significant and as having long-term research value. |
| Broadway Theatre | The Broadway Theatre Archive Established in 1999 as a place to preserve and protect information related to the production and presentation of Broadway shows. |
| UK Theatre Australian Theatre Canadian Theatre Global Theatre |
The University of Bristol Theatre Collection The Theatre Collection was founded in 1951 and has grown to become one of the world’s leading collections relating to the history of British theatre and live art. It holds artworks, audio visual material, costumes, designs, set models, playbills and programs documenting life onstage and offstage, providing a unique insight into theatre and live art, their creative processes and broader cultural contexts. |
| Shakespeare Content | Folger Shakespeare Library The world’s largest Shakespeare collection, from original sources to modern interpretations. Opened in 1932, the Folger is home to major collections of other rare books, manuscripts, and works of art. |
| USA Theatre Broadway Theatre |
Museum of the City of New York The Theater Collection contains over 200,000 objects that document theatrical performance in New York City from 1785 to present day Broadway productions. With significant material on Broadway productions and related personalities. |
| USA Theatre Broadway Theatre |
Harvard Theatre Collection Founded in 1901, the Harvard Theatre Collection stands as one of the oldest and largest performing arts collections in the world. |
| USA Theatre Broadway Theatre |
Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin It’s performing arts collection documents a wide variety of performance genres, feature holdings in theatre, dance, music, opera, and popular entertainments, such as the circus, vaudeville, pantomime, minstrel shows, puppetry, and magic. The Center holds one of the largest collections of American, British, and Irish playwright archives with hundreds of thousands of original manuscripts, letters, photographs, designs, playbills, books, costumes, and recordings. It is here I sent much of the Jule Styne and James Roose-Evans archives. |
| Australian Theatre | NIDA Library and Archives / The Rodney Seaborn Library The Rodney Seaborn Library is a specialist library for NIDA students, graduates and staff is one of Australia’s leading performing arts-based libraries. |
| UK Theatre Global Theatre |
The V&A’s Theatre & Performance Archive The V&A’s Archives founded in the 1920s are the national collection of performing arts documenting the history of all areas of performing arts in the UK, including drama, dance, opera, circus, puppetry, comedy, musical theatre, costume, set design, pantomime, popular music and more. |
| Everything | Internet Archive / Wayback Machine The Internet Archive began in 1996 and is a digital library of cultural artifacts in digital form. Providing access to researchers, historians, scholars, people with print disabilities, and the general public. Today it maintains decades of web history. |
NOTE: Depending on content, certain pages are additionally submitted to specialized resources as the case may be.
Most of my theatrical information, including professional people, is also extracted and added into various databases (some manually, some automatically) such as IMDB, About the Artists, TTdb.ca, AusStage, BroadwayWorld, IBDB (replica of Playbill), Theatricalia, ITdb etc…
WorldCat Registry ID: 270066
Sending historical memorabilia to some small bricks and mortar museum archives is like burying the memorabilia in a coffin never to be seen again in our lifetime unless you are physically at the archive, which the vast majority of interested parties are not. Archivists and staff associated with preservation and sharing of memorabilia are generally disinterested in offering digital copies of anything at some of these since it would involve additonal effort. Therefore, before anything goes to be locked down in a museum, often in moldy cardboard boxes in a basement, I strongly recommend that scans or good clean photographs of the memorabilia be taken in detail to create a digital copy that everybody in the world can access. For photos and programs, these can then be additionally used to update other historical archives such as databases, individual websites and other listings.