The Klaus Archives - York Master

[Donn]

As recently came to light here, I have taken the immense photo archives collected by Klaus Bjerre in his YorkMasterPublicPhotosIII site to another web site. Principally to preserve it, after the original Yahoo storage is gone in a month, but also in the hope of making it more accessible.

This new site is http://yorkmaster.org/.

Klaus is gone, as I think most of you know. He was a treasured long time Tubenet member. When his health was failing a couple years ago, he reached out to a couple Tubenet members who appeared to have a lot of time on their hands and devolved administrative privileges on them, to the Yahoo site. I'm not sure exactly why I was honored with that, he likely didn't foresee this particular turn of events, but luckily I happen to have some computer skills that served me well in extracting the archived material from Yahoo. In me, however, he did not get a web designer, so I've made a virtue of necessity and set the site up with nearly the simplest possible web presentation.

What you will find there is

• A huge collection of photos of brass instruments, organized as 5,000 or so albums. It's particularly rich in old European makes. (A tip: I didn't trouble myself to make thumbnail images, don't know how anyway. So when you're looking at the album page, you've downloaded everything in the album, and it won't take any longer to look at an individual image at full resolution. I think.)
• A lot of arrangements for various groups of instruments. I would say mostly classical works, but there's really a range. (The YorkMasterBBb Yahoo group.)

I'm not reorganizing this data or curating it in any way. I feel Klaus did a fine job with that. If you have pictures you'd like to see catalogued like this, you might see if horn-u-copia.net will take them. But I sure would like to know if anything seems to be not right in the archives, or if there are basic improvements that could be made to the web presentation, etc. Enjoy the use of this material, as Klaus certainly wished - the inconveniences posed by the old Yahoo site didn't serve any purpose for him, it was just one of what must have been very few options available for free unlimited storage 15 years ago or so when he started doing this.

[finnbogi]

Thank you so much for rescuing Klaus' archives and making them available to all!

[cjk]

Donn is a TubeNet hero!!

[The Big Ben]

Thank you! The archive will provide information for research for years to come.

[Conn 2J CC]

Thank you, Donn - much obliged.

[rodgeman]

Thank you for preserving the information. Thanks also for taking the time. Good job!

[roweenie]

This

Thank-you so very much!
The quirks of yahoo groups defines that fact that (I strongly suspect) the VAST majority of us are seeing these files for the VERY FIRST TIME.

We would register, attempt to log in, fail, and go on about our business.

Perhaps weeks/months/years later, we would attempt the procedure again, and be told by yahoo that we are already registered, and - thus - our new registration was/is refused.

(Perhaps, this explains the failure/shutting down of this portion of the yahoo sphere...??)

so (back to "keeping the main-thing the main-thing") THANK-YOU !!!

"A picture is worth a thousand words." I see this as being a great resource for us "shade-tree" tuba builders.

I add my thanks and appreciation with the others.

[acemorgan]

You are going to hear this a lot, but thank you for this valuable work.

[bort]

Thank you, Donn!
Thank you, Klaus!

[scottw]

Thank you, Donn!
Thank you, Klaus!

+ 1

[roughrider]

Thank you, Donn!
Thank you, Klaus!

[toobagrowl]

Good work!

[gionvil]

I was lucky enough to express my gratitude to Klaus a few years ago, when I could use his rendition of Strauss' Feierlicher Einzug in a memorable performance, even if I regret we couldn't make any recording and I wished he could have listened. I will do my best to have a chance to perform it again, and this time sure he will listen to it! Now is the turn to thank Donn for the precious work, grazie!

[humBell]

My thanks as well.

I am wondering how long it will take me to actually look at all of them.

And being a G&S fan, i may try to recruit friends to play the 'Strange Adventure' arrangement.

[gmcblane]

Thank you Donn!

[SousaWarrior9]

When attempting to access the photo archives recently, I was unable to get any of the links to actually load, saying the site "took too long to respond". Is anyone else experiencing this, or is my computer just too slow to handle all of the data?

[proam]

Good gracious, I just spent an hour randomly looking at photos. There is a little of everything in there.

I'm not sure that I know what I'm looking at. Are these photos that were posted to that group over the years? Looks like they have come from everywhere... I saw a couple that I think I recognized from old ebay ads.

Edit: OK, I just saw photos from an ebay ad for a horn that I actually bought and owned for a few years.

[Donn]

Sure, anywhere. I was looking at it today myself, in case there might actually be something wrong there, and saw some Kalison 6/4 pictures that I remember spending a lot of time looking at here. I suppose he drew quite a few photos from here, including the "For Sale" section where I think he got that set of photos. There were one or two major contributors besides Klaus, but it was mostly him.

Access times for an image are too brief for accuracy with the tools I'm using, which don't report fractions of a second. I mean, seems like less than a second, but "1" second could be anywhere from 0.001 to 1.000 and possibly more.

[roughrider]

A wonderful collection of photos! I was pleased to see that my 1916 Holton "Mammoth" 3 valve BBb is in the collection!