Some 20+ years ago, I brokered the gift of a hi-end electronic theatre
organ to a local university.  That organ had a roll player attached to
it, and it came with 600+ 88-note rolls, dominantly ragtime and blues.

The donor saw the value in the rolls.  The university saw the value in
the organ.  The university accepted both.

Twenty years go by. I now have a working roll scanner, so I approached
the university to gain access to the rolls for scanning purposes.
I immediately detected some uneasiness in their response.  Later
I learned that the rolls could not be found.  Nobody knew where they
were.  Much suppressed embarrassment.  The organ is no longer there.

Some six weeks go by, and I get an invite for morning coffee with a
friend.  He brought along a friend of his who turned out to be the
person, now retired, I dealt with at the university some 20 years
earlier.  The rolls had been found and, yes, I can have access to them.

Within an hour I had all 18 boxes of rolls safely in my home, rescued
from a bare garage floor in the home of this fellow.  They had been
there for many years, fortunately dry.  He does not have a player piano.

It seems this fellow is known to rescue important items of heritage
value when he suspects they are in danger of evaporation.  Many years
ago, he learned the rolls were about to be tossed out, for lack of
interest and appreciation of their content.  So he simply moved them
to his home, fully expecting that, somewhere along the line, somebody
would express an interest and know of their value.

Somebody better check with the folks at Cornell to see if in fact their
"vast roll library" still exists.  If not, that might explain why they
declined a gift of a working Ampico piano.  It may have provoked huge
embarrassment.

Just something to think about.

Regards,

Terry Smythe
Winnipeg, MB, Canada
http://www.mts.net/~smythe/