Association for Recorded Sound Collections
organization
The Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and study of sound recordings.
Established in 1966, members include record collectors, discographers, and audio engineers, together with librarians, curators, archivists, and researchers.
History
ARSC was founded in 1966 by a group of academics, primarily music librarians, who felt that contemporary professional associations such as the Music Library Association (MLA) were not paying enough attention to the special needs of recorded sound archives, and that scholars were giving too little attention to historical recorded sound as opposed to printed sources. In contrast to professional organizations such as the MLA and the American Library Association, ARSC by design also welcomed private record collectors, since they held (and needed to preserve) many important recordings that were not present in institutional collections. Furthermore, ARSC was intended to bring together collectors from all genres, classical, jazz, popular, etc., as well as those concerned with spoken word recordings.
After three organizational meetings in 1965 and 1966, and the election of its first president, Philip L. Miller, Chief of the Music Division, New York Public Library, ARSC's first annual conference was held at Indiana University in March 1967. Its first publication was the Preliminary Directory of Sound Recording Collections in the United States and Canada (1967), listing 1,500 public and private collections. This was followed by the launch of the ARSC Journal (1968), the ARSC Newsletter (1977), and other publications. Other important projects have included The Rigler-Deutsch Index, a union catalog of the 615,000 78 rpm holdings of five major public archives. Data from this massive project is now part of the WorldCat online library catalog.
“Association for Recorded Sound Collections” enters the record as organization. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Association, Recorded and Sound can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Association for Recorded Sound Collections” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Association, Recorded and Sound provides the most credible route into that argument.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4809507. VIAF identifies the subject as 121919956. The Library of Congress control number is n82143103. 2 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1966, 1965, 1967 and 1968.
Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
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Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Association for Recorded Sound Collections”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Association for Recorded Sound Collections primary sources, Association for Recorded Sound Collections archive and Association research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Association for Recorded Sound Collections”?
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- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Association for Recorded Sound Collections” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.