American organization, founded in 1966 to promote the preservation and study of historic recordings in all areas of music and the spoken word. Its membership, drawn from 23 countries, numbers over 1000 and includes private collectors as well as sound archivists, librarians, media producers, record dealers, discographers, recording engineers, musicians and record reviewers. The ARSC holds an annual conference each year to disseminate discographic information and to provide a forum for presentations and panel discussions in all aspects of recorded sound research. The ARSC also publishes a biannual journal which includes major research articles, technical developments, discographies, record and book reviews and bibliographies; a quarterly newsletter which contains information about member activities, meetings and events, and a membership directory, updated every two years, which lists all ARSC members, their collecting interests and research projects. Other special publications include major archival projects undertaken by an ARSC committee, the Associated Audio Archives, including Rules for Archival Cataloging of Sound Recordings (Albuquerque, 1980, 2/1995), Audio Preservation: a Planning Study (Silver Spring, MD, 1988), and the Rigler and Deutsch Record Index (Syracuse, NY and Rochester, NY, 1983–6), which inventories all the 78 r.p.m. holdings of five major sound archives at the following institutions: Library of Congress, New York Public Library, Syracuse University, Yale University and Stanford University. The ARSC annually awards grants for researchers in the field of recorded sound as well as awards for excellence in historical sound research.
See also Sound archives.
T. Brooks: ‘Association for Recorded Sound Collections: an Unusual Organization’, Goldmine, no.81 (1983), 22–3
E. McKee: ‘ARSC/AAA: Fifteen Years of Cooperative Research’, ARSC Journal, no.1 (1988–9), 3–13
〈www.arsc-audio.org〉
SARA VELEZ