Visit IU's Archives of Traditional Music
Research the collections in a renovated Reading Room in the Cook Music Library
IU Libraries' Archives of Traditional Music offers an inspiring Reading Room on the second floor of the world-class William and Gayle Cook Music Library.
Indiana University’s Archives of Traditional Music (ATM) has reopened to the public in a new space on the Bloomington campus. Located on the second floor of the William and Gayle Cook Music Library, the ATM Reading Room is designed to facilitate multi-modal engagement with the Archives, including research, instruction, presentations, exhibits, and musical performances.
Founded in 1948, the IU Archives of Traditional Music is the largest university-based ethnographic sound archive in the United States. Its founder, George Herzog, figures prominently in the emergence of Ethnomusicology as a field of study. Herzog’s personal library of wax cylinders, along with his connections to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and their collections, formed the seed on which the Archive was built. The ATM now contains over 7,000 wax cylinders (an early audio recording format), 70,000 discs, and 40,000 reel tapes, among other formats, comprising over 250,000 hours of recorded sound.
From Herzog’s time forward, a long line of distinguished ATM staff and stewards have worked to document and preserve the Archive’s sound recordings, photos, manuscripts, videos, and other materials. Many ATM holdings are field collections, the name given to materials recorded at the location where they usually occur, for example, on a front porch, at a sacred site, or as part of a festival event. Field collections contain one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable recordings that require particular care and storage conditions to avoid degradation or destruction.
Preserving the past in the digital era
As part of IU’s commitment to the future of the Archive, the ATM’s audio and visual recordings were included in the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative (MDPI). The MDPI project, begun in 2015, was designed to preserve audio-visual material in digital file format. A digital file can be accessed in place of the original, which is then safely housed in IU’s state-of-the-art Auxiliary Library Facility, designed to store vulnerable materials under the most favorable conditions possible. Digital files also serve as a backup of the Archive’s unique sonic and visual materials, and they can be shared relatively easily, facilitating engagement with the Archives both locally and internationally.
At the local level, the ATM has longstanding partnerships with numerous campus departments, including Anthropology, Linguistics, the Jacobs School of Music, and especially Folklore & Ethnomusicology (F & E). F & E Graduate Assistants train at the ATM in the handling and documentation of archival materials, providing valuable contributions to the processing of the archives as they do so. Instructors from many other programs such as History, African-American & African Diaspora Studies, Law, and East Asian Languages & Culture make use of Archives material as part of their course curricula.
The ATM is home to a large number of recordings of Indigenous North Americans. Like many tangible cultural artifacts acquired from Indigenous cultures in the 20th century by non-Indigenous researchers, these recordings of music, storytelling, and other practices may hold great significance within their originating cultures. The people who were recorded did not necessarily intend for those recordings to be shared outside their communities. In order to address this challenge, the ATM works with IU’s Office of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and tribal partners to ensure ethical stewardship and/or return of materials to their rightful owners. IU NAGPRA Director Jayne-Leigh Thomas is a welcome partner to the ATM in this endeavor.
For those who remember the former Archives location in Morrison Hall, including the Hoagy Carmichael Room, the majority of the Hoagy Carmichael artifacts and memorabilia are still on display in the new location, including his desk, jukebox, and piano.
Hoagy Carmichael's most famous song, "Stardust," was added to the National Recording Registry by the Librarian of Congress in 2004. The original manuscript for "Stardust" resides at the Archives of Traditional Music. Learn more about the Hoagy Carmichael collections at Indiana University.
Welcome to Heather Sloan and Amy Rose Wilson
In addition to a new location, the ATM has recently welcomed new personnel.
Administrative Assistant Amy Rose Wilson began in January of 2023. Amy holds a Master’s in Library and Information Sciences from University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, and has expertise in user experience, reference and support services, library management, and information literacy.
Heather Sloan joined the ATM in July of 2024. She holds a Doctor of Musical Arts in Percussion Performance, does field work on folkloric music of the Dominican Republic, and earned a Master’s in Library Science from IU Bloomington with a specialization in Digital Humanities.
The ATM’s mission is “to preserve and make accessible the collections for use by educators, researchers, and interested members of the public, including the people from whom the material was collected” and “to foster the educational and cultural role of Indiana University through the preservation and dissemination of the world’s music and oral traditions.” The ATM staff extends a warm welcome to all who would like to join them in that endeavor.
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Contributors
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Taylor Burnette
IU Libraries 2024-25 Railsback Fellow