The

Indiana University Indiana University (IU) is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana. Campuses Indiana University has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration of IUPUI. *Indiana Universi ...

Archives of Traditional Music holds over 100,000 individual audio and video recordings across over 3500 collections of field, broadcast, and commercial recordings. Its holdings are primarily focused on audiovisual recordings relating to research in the academic disciplines of

ethnomusicology Ethnomusicology is the study of music from the cultural and social aspects of the people who make it. It encompasses distinct theoretical and methodical approaches that emphasize cultural, social, material, cognitive, biological, and other dim ...

folklore Folklore is shared by a particular group of people; it encompasses the traditions common to that culture, subculture or group. This includes oral traditions such as tales, legends, proverbs and jokes. They include material culture, rangin ...

anthropology Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of be ...

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Ling ...

, and various area studies.

History

The archive was initiated by George Herzog at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

in 1936. It was modeled on the

Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv The Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv is a collection of ethnomusicological recordings or world music, mostly on phonographic cylinders, assembled since 1900 in Berlin, Germany by the institution of the same name. The collection The project was initi ...

, where Herzog had worked as an assistant to Erich M. von Hornbostel from 1921 to 1924. Herzog brought the nascent archive to

in 1948 when he was appointed as professor in the Department of Anthropology. The archive was formally established at Indiana University in 1954 under its second director, George List, as the Archives of Folk and Primitive Music. Its present name, the Archives of Traditional Music, was adopted in 1964 when it became a division of the Folklore Institute.

Directors

Facilities

* Listening Library: a public service point for visitors where they can listen and view recordings and get reference assistance from staff. * Reading Room * Hoagy Carmichael Room: a room is used for performances, lectures and receptions and displays artifacts, photographs, and manuscripts from the life and career of

Hoagy Carmichael Hoagland Howard Carmichael (November 22, 1899 – December 27, 1981) was an American musician, composer, songwriter, actor and lawyer. Carmichael was one of the most successful Tin Pan Alley songwriters of the 1930s, and was among the first ...

. The room can be visited by appointment during the open hours of the Archives of Traditional Music. * Studios * Vault: A 2,138 square foot temperature- and humidity-controlled storage space. Many formats of materials are kept in the vault, including 7000 wax cylinders, 4600 lacquer discs, 2625 aluminum discs, 250 wires, 18,000 open reel tapes, 7500 audiocassettes, 911 films, and 1500 video recordings. Nearly half of the recordings are unique field recordings that document the expressive culture and languages of peoples around the world.

Holdings

Holdings of the Archives of Traditional Music are cataloged at the collection level as

MARC Marc or MARC may refer to: People * Marc (given name), people with the first name * Marc (surname), people with the family name Acronyms * MARC standards, a data format used for library cataloging, * MARC Train, a regional commuter rail system of ...

records within the Indiana University online library catalog, IUCAT. These can be searched through http://iucat.iu.edu. Using the "advanced search" capabilities of IUCAT, a user can restrict a search to only ATM Library holdings. Commercial recordings as well as many broadcast recordings are cataloged at the item level, which means there is one catalog record per physical item. Field collections, on the other hand, may consist of hundreds of recordings as well as photographs, field notes, and other materials.

Holdings on the National Recording Registry

Preservation

Following insights gained through the Sound Directions Project about a looming crisis in time-based media preservation, staff at the ATM pursued a collaborative strategy for saving its media holdings. In 2008, they participated in a small coalition of archivists and librarians at Indiana University that began a survey of the audio-visual materials held on the Bloomington Campus. The survey was prompted by the recognition that the university held a large amount of time-based media in danger of deterioration and playback obsolescence. This survey revealed that the Bloomington campus held more than a half-million audiovisual recordings across eighty units and that large portions of the university's holdings were at risk for loss. Following the publication of a survey report in 2009, the Office of the Vice Provost for Research funded a preservation planning document under the aegis of what was known as the Media Preservation Initiative (MPI). Based on the recommendations of the planning document, Indiana University President Michael McRobbie announced a 15 million dollar commitment to the preservation of audio and video recordings on the Bloomington campus. The resulting endeavor was renamed the Media Preservation and Digitization Initiative (MDPI) which formed a partnership with Memnon Archiving Services to digitally preserve 280,000 audio and video recordings by 2020. In 2017, 12,000 films from Indiana University's Moving Image Archives and other campus collections, including the Archives of Traditional Music, were added to the efforts of MDPI. As the largest holder of unique and rare audiovisual recordings at Indiana University, nearly all of the archives' 100,000 recordings will be digitized by 2020 through this initiative. MDPI was the first – and as of 2018 the only – university-based media preservation effort in the United States on this scale.

Projects

Archive of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories

The AHEYM Project has collected nearly 400 interviews related to Jewish life before, during, and after World War II. Conducted primarily in Yiddish, the interviewees come from small towns throughout Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia. The current online exhibit cover daily life, foodways, Jewish life between the wars, religion, World War II and the Holocaust, and Jewish life after World War II. The archive can be explored by location, person, or subject. Preservation and cataloging of AHEYM Project recordings was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Ethnographic Video for Instruction and Analysis (EVIA) Digital Archive

The EVIA Digital Archive is a project created to host a digital archive of ethnographic videos for educational use. The projected originated from a collaboration between Indiana University and University of Michigan.

Ethnomusicology Multimedia

EM publishes books and supplemental audiovisual material on

Ethnomusicology Ethnomusicology is the study of music from the cultural and social aspects of the people who make it. It encompasses distinct theoretical and methodical approaches that emphasize cultural, social, material, cognitive, biological, and other dim ...

in order to aid scholars in research. EM offers access to Annotation Management System (AMS), which allows authors to upload audiovisual material and link it to content in their text. EM is a joint project between Indiana and Temple Universities.

Hoagy Carmichael Online

The

Project at

was a project funded by IMLS between 1999 and 2000 to digitize and preserve the extensive collection of items related to Hoagy Carmichael that are housed at Indiana University. This early digital collection website aimed to present in its entirety the complete Carmichael collection. The collection contains sound recordings, letters, photographs, lyric sheets, correspondence, as well as personal effects. It offers a biography and a virtual tour of the Carmichael Room located at the Archives of Traditional Music.

Liberian Collections Project

The Liberian Collection was established in 2002. The Archives of Traditional Music is home to the audiovisual part of the collection.

Sound Directions

The Sound Directions Project was a joint project between Indiana University's Archives of Traditional Music and Harvard University's Archive of World Music and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities between 2005 and 2011. Phase 1 consisted of testing and determining the best practices and workflows for digital audio preservation. The following two phases focused on the preservation of archive holdings and on the development of software tools for media assessment and technical metadata collection.

Publications

* ''ReSound'' (quarterly) ; OCLC: 10204552. Issues are available online a
IU ScholarWorks
* ''Folklore and Folk Music Archivist'' ; OCLC: 1569577. Issues are available online a
IU ScholarWorks

References

{{Reflist

External links

Archives of Traditional MusicHoagy Carmichael Collection
1954 establishments in Indiana American folk music American folklore Columbia University Ethnomusicology Folk museums in the United States Folklore studies Indiana University Bloomington Music libraries