It was 1983 when Streisand first mentioned Just For the Record publiclly. She told Gene Shalit, during an interview for Yentl, “I'm working on a retrospective album that's called Just For the Record ... This record will open with my demo at 12 years old.” 　　Barbra recorded “You'll Never Know”, the duet with her younger self that is the last track on Just For the Record, in April 1988 during studio sessions with Rupert Holmes. “Warm All Over” was recorded then, too. 　　Streisand's manager Marty Erlichman took out ads (one was placed in the back pages of American Film magazine) asking for fans to contribute rare material to the project. Tapes, kinescopes, and even an old wire recording were sent. “A lot of the old TV shows, like Johnny Carson and Mike Wallace's P.M. East, were all erased,” Erlichman told Entertainment Weekly. “So the only way to get them was if fans had them.” 　　Even finding some of the older, rarer tapes at Streisand's label, Columbia Records, proved to be a treasure hunt. “There were an awful lot of tapes that we knew existed that we couldn't find. And [Columbia has] big vaults in mountains.” 　　“If someone hadn't already taken the title, we'd have called it `Act One,' " said Marty Erlichman. “The intention of the set is to give a ‘you are there’ quality. The project meant a lot to Barbra. When we first sat down to listen to the tapes, it was a very emotional experience for her. It brought back all kinds of memories.” 　　Karen Swenson, credited as Project Coordinator, assembled many of the recordings for Just For the Record. Barry Dennen's tapes, made when he and Barbra were friends, circa 1961, were considered. Dennen said he had early private recordings, as well as live recordings from The Lion and the Bon Soir. Marty Erlichman tried to work with Dennen so that the tapes could be included on JFTR. Eventually he gave up. “We did have plenty of material,” Swenson explained. “Obviously, money also factors into this. But it would have been a nice gesture on Barry's part to share a copy of the tape with Barbra—just to have it for her own archive.” 　　Swenson told the L.A. Times, “A private collector had one of Barbra's Tonight Show appearances that we couldn't find anywhere else,” Swenson said. “And I found her Yentl audition tapes, with her sitting at the piano with Michel Legrand, in her closet—she'd forgotten she even had them.” 　　“During the course of gathering material for JFTR,” Swenson said, “I came across several collectors who did not want to share copies of tapes they had with Barbra. It's a strange way of thinking. Sure a recording has value keeping it to yourself, but imagine the gratification of being able to share it with the very person whose performance gives it value in the first place!” 　　Not only did Swenson and Landers uncover rare tracks, sometimes salvaging the original recordings was required! “We had one tape that was in such poor condition that the oxide was peeling off,” Swenson recalled. “But we learned a neat trick—we sent it to an expert at Columbia, who baked it in an oven at 350 degrees, which somehow brought the tape back to life long enough for us to make a new copy.” 　　Jay Landers performed Artists and Repertoire duties on JFTR (A&R reps liaison between the artist and the record label). Landers told Barbra News, “Just For The Record gave me a chance to look through her archives and re-visit many aspects of her artistic accomplishments that were before my time. One day, it would be great to expand the box set with even more of the material we simply couldn’t fit onto the four discs.” 　　Barbra told the press, “You don't know how difficult it is to listen to those things (the archival material). I picked a lot of the songs. For two and a half years they were trying to master them, engineer them, recut several things together, find the tapes, all that stuff. The last two months I had to write the notes.” 　　Streisand elaborated: “I started three years ago, talking into a tape recorder. Then when it was time to release it ... at the last minute it was a horror. That's why it took so long. It was supposed to come out at Christmas 1990. But we just got it out a few weeks ago. I didn't want both products out at the same time.” 　　A 2-VHS tape video companion to the 4-CD set was prepared, utilizing rare footage of Streisand's career, but ultimately not released. Streisand talked about the video in 2005: