Editing Berliner Gramophone (section)

==Legacy and preservation==
The range of material on Berliner records was wider than that available from cylinder companies in the 1890s. As may be expected, Berliner was well-supplied with the typical band and song selections commonly found on cylinders, but he also branched out into piano music, ragtime, speeches, sermons, instrumental solos and some ethnographic material on a greater scale than his competitors. From the beginning, Berliner's European subsidiaries were deeply invested in opera and classical music, only indirectly exploited by American cylinder companies, at least in the 1890s.
[[File:List of plates - Jan 1895 (Berliner Gramophone Co.).png|thumb|Catalogue of commercially available records released in Jan 1895. Some of the 1892 recordings can be seen (namely BeA 205, 256 and 300)]]
Documenting the output of American Berliner has proved a daunting task, as original records are scarce collector's items and the company employed a system of block numbering that seems to make little sense. Although referred to commonly as "Berliner matrices", they are not true matrix numbers, but catalog numbers concerned with preserving the same number for each selection even if a given title was re-recorded by another artist. Subsequent re-recordings are usually given a letter suffix, usually "Z-W" for early releases.<ref>[http://www.78discography.com/Berliner.htm The Online Discographical Project: Early Series]</ref> Helpfully, the recording or matrix processing date is usually inscribed in the label area, but as Berliner did not employ paper labels sometimes the information is difficult to read. Many times the matrix numbers were reused to fit new records into the crumbling block system, such as the case of block 900 (which was meant to be for popular and international songs, only to be completely scrapped and refocused on opera excerpts, granting most matrix numbers to opera singer [[Ferruccio Giannini]]).<ref>{{Cite web |title=Ferruccio Giannini |url=https://adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/mastertalent/detail/107964/Giannini_Ferruccio |access-date=2024-03-03 |website=Discography of American Historical Recordings}}</ref>

A simple new more or less sequential numbering system was started in March 1899, in which every number had a leading zero (never used previously) and the letter suffix, when present, denoted the category, e.g., "A" for marching band, "F" for banjo, "N" for vocal quartet.<ref>[http://www.78discography.com/Berliner0.htm The Online Discographical Project: Berliner Discs, Later "0" Prefix Series]</ref> Berliner's foreign matrices employed entirely different strategies, and many to most of those have been documented by discographer [[Alan Kelly (discographer)|Alan Kelly]].

In 2014, the [[EMI Archive Trust]] announced an online initiative that would collect information on Berliner records worldwide. They have what appears to be the largest concentration of Berliner records in one place, numbering close to 18,000 items and largely collected by Fred Gaisberg in the early years of the company.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.emiarchivetrust.org/collection/berliners/ |title=The EMI Archive Trust – The Berliner Project |access-date=2014-04-07 |archive-date=2015-09-20 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150920010614/http://www.emiarchivetrust.org/collection/berliners/ |url-status=dead }}</ref> Another large concentration of Canadian Berliners are held by the [[National Library of Canada]], which has set up the Virtual Gramophone on the web to provide access to them, though their focus is primarily on Canadian artists.<ref>[https://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/gramophone/index-e.html National Library of Canada: The Virtual Gramophone]</ref>

There is a notable collection of Berliner records and gramophones housed at the Musée des ondes Emile Berliner, located in [[Montreal]], QC, in one of the old [[RCA Victor]] factories.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Preserving St-Henri's history of sound: Musée des ondes Emile Berliner located in former RCA Victor factory |url=https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/montreals-musee-des-ondes-emile-berliner-is-a-history-of-sound-that-highlights-gramophone-inventor |access-date=2022-08-11 |website=montrealgazette |language=en-CA}}</ref>