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EnglishWhat Collections Are Available on Citizen DJ?
Updated
Citizen DJ's homepage asks you to "Select a collection to start," and five collections are listed there. Each one covers a different type of material — early film and sound recordings, vaudeville performance, musician interviews, rights-free music, and a folklorist's documentation project — and each offers its own Explore, Remix, and Browse & download entry points.
The five collections
| Collection | Type of material | What's in it |
|---|---|---|
| Inventing Entertainment | Music and spoken word | The Early Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies: 341 motion pictures, 81 disc sound recordings, plus related materials such as photographs and original magazine articles |
| Variety Stage | Music and sketches | 61 motion pictures — animal acts, burlesque, dance, comic sketches, dramatic excerpts, dramatic sketches, physical culture acts, and tableaus, with copyrights dating from 1897 to 1920 |
| The Joe Smith Collection | Interviews | More than 200 celebrated singers, musicians, and industry icons talking about their lives, music, experiences, and contemporaries; donated to the Library of Congress in 2012 as unedited sound recordings |
| Free Music Archive | Music | A website devoted to distribution and curation of rights-free music, archived by the Library of Congress as part of its Web Cultures Web Archive |
| MusicBox Project | Music | A project founded in 2010 by Dyann Arthur, an independent folklorist and musicologist, documenting and preserving musical history; from 2009 onward she and Rick Arthur travelled through America meeting and interviewing women musicians |
How each collection is organized
Every collection on the homepage presents the same three options:
- Explore — browse the collection's contents.
- Remix — work with the sounds in the browser.
- Browse & download — get the sounds for use in your own software.
So the choice you're making on the homepage is mainly about what kind of source material you want, not about different tools. If you want spoken interviews, go to The Joe Smith Collection. If you want early 20th-century performance footage and recordings, Inventing Entertainment or Variety Stage are the fit. If you want music that is already rights-free, Free Music Archive and MusicBox Project are the direct options.
A note on what's been added
The homepage states that thousands of public domain recordings were added in 2022, with a link to read more about what has been added. If you explored Citizen DJ earlier and found the collections thin, it's worth checking again.
Choosing between them
- For spoken-word or interview material: The Joe Smith Collection.
- For early film and historical recordings: Inventing Entertainment (largest listed count at 341 motion pictures plus 81 disc sound recordings) or Variety Stage (61 motion pictures, 1897–1920).
- For music you can reuse without rights clearance: Free Music Archive or MusicBox Project.
- For vaudeville-style performance: Variety Stage.
Citizen DJ is a project by Brian Foo as part of the 2020 Innovator in Residence Program at the Library of Congress, and it invites the public to make music using free-to-use audio and video collections — the idea being that embedding these materials in hip hop lets listeners discover items in the library's collections they likely would never have known existed.