Afrika Bambaataa’s 40,000-strong record collection to be preserved at Cornell University

Originally posted on FACT.

The hip-hop legend’s enormous collection will be archived and viewable to the public soon.

Afrika Bambaataa’s record collection will be archived and preserved in the Cornell University Library’s Hip Hop Collection, the school’s newspaper The Chronicle reports. The acquisition comes after the end of Bambaataa’s three year term as the Cornell Hip Hop Collection’s first visiting scholar and was allowed through a $260,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Though the collection had been preserved by the school during his tenure as visiting scholar and was even displayed in a gallery in 2013, the new grant will allow for the archiving required to make information about the collection widely available to students and the public.

Fortunately, they’re already got a head start as many of the records were personally annotated by Bambaataa and numbered in the order he got them. Once the collection is properly archived, the full list of records and images of many of the annotated covers will be made available to the public online.