ARSC Member News

The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress is hiring a Director, AFC Archives to lead the day-to-day administration of the Archive of Folk Culture. The Archives Director is responsible for managing teams of archivists, technicians, and digital specialists who steward a dynamic ethnographic archives documenting traditional culture from around the world, including the earliest field recordings made in the 1890s on wax cylinder through recordings made using digital technology. The Director is responsible for acquisitions, processing, preservation and digital access activities related to the Center’s collections, which includes the Veterans History Project collection.

The role is a significant leadership opportunity, calling for the successful applicant to work with the AFC Director and a team of supervisors and team leads, to lead a committed archives staff as they serve the needs of Congress and the public.

Supervises a group of employees performing work up to the GS-14 level. Provides administrative and technical supervision relative to the staff supervised. Plans work to be accomplished by subordinates, sets and adjusts short-term priorities, and prepares schedules for completion of work; assigns work to subordinates based on priorities, selective consideration of the difficulty and requirements of assignments, and the capabilities of employees; observes workers’ performance; demonstrates and conducts work performance critiques. Establishes guidelines and performance expectations for staff and clearly communicates these through the formal employee performance management system. Provides informal feedback and periodically evaluates employee performance. Resolves informal complaints and grievances. Recommends appointment, promotion, or reassignment and develops work improvement plans, recommending personnel actions as necessary. Provides advice and counsel to workers related to work and administrative matters.

Serves as a primary advisor to top management on the various folklife archives and library preservation projects and/or programs, policies and initiatives, including the Veterans History Project. Plans, develops and carries out a vital archives project planning and execution of highly visible projects and the participation in the evaluation, development and documentation of long-term and short-term archives special collections strategies. Plans, develops and implements complex multi-phased archival preservation and access projects that require collaboration and coordination across multiple service units, the formation of cross-divisional working groups; and collaboration with other governmental agencies and external partners.

Handles and troubleshoots largely undefined issues and elements that require deep probing and analysis to determine the scope and nature of the problem. Develops authoritative new approaches, methods or standards to resolve critical or highly unusual project planning related problems. The projects are essential to the missions of the Library and affects large numbers of people on a long-term or continuing basis. The work encompasses a broad range of library functions and processes related to the acquisition, management and preservation of Folklife related collections and archives projects.

Serves as a primary advisor to the AFC Director on the development and stewardship of AFC collections, including establishing acquisitions policies and priorities; developing and implementing preservation protocols and practices for AFC’s digital and analog collections.

Provides expert, authoritative guidance to AFC Director regarding AFC acquisition and collections development policy, to include matters pertaining to subject areas, scope, format, preservation, security and access.

Serves as an expert consultant to the Director of the American Folklife Center regarding the development and preservation of ethnographic collections. Serves as an expert consultant to top senior management in Library Services and the Special Collections directorate on matters pertaining to archival policies and preservation of cultural heritage collections. Reports regularly to senior management of Library Services and directorate regarding intra-division activities and collaborative projects and programs. Establishes and maintains close and cooperative working relationships with Library of Congress officials including the LC Office of Communications, LC Congressional Relations Office, with related interests in the subject areas within the purview of the AFC.

Provides expert advice to Division colleagues regarding work related to folklife, ethnomusicology, archiving, reference services, and archival instruction and training, and access services. Works with other Division leadership in developing and providing access to library resources in the Archive on site, online and other means. Engages in the implementation and evaluation of reference and public service policies, procedures and publications.

For the full description and application details, visit: https://www.usajobs.gov/job/844370100

I'm excited to announce that Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT) is hiring a Music & Audiovisual Archivist. This is a new full-time, early-career professional position based in the World Music Archives & Music Library. The person in this position will also work with AV materials from across our parent department of Unique Collections.

A brief description is below. For more details and to apply, please see the full posting on Careers at Wesleyan.
https://wesleyan.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/careers/job/Middletown-CT-Main-Campus/Music---Audiovisual-Archivist_R100648

Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions.

Music & Audiovisual Archivist

Reporting to the Director of the World Music Archives & Music Librarian, the Music & Audiovisual Archivist will manage daily operations of the WMA and ensure quality control in processing digital and physical materials. They will oversee workflows and student staffing related to the development, maintenance, and accessibility of materials in all formats held by the WMA. Additionally, they will manage processing and digitization of audiovisual and music materials in Wesleyan's other Unique Collections. Library staff work collaboratively, and this position will actively engage with staff across the library and the university to meet the responsibilities of this position and to contribute to the Libraries' overall success.

The Wesleyan University World Music Archives (WMA), part of the World Music Archives & Music Library, is a research and teaching collection of over 20,000 rare or unique audio and video recordings and other documents and objects, reflecting music making as social and creative practice across the world.  From its roots as an ethnomusicological teaching collection of Native American music, it has expanded to include significant holdings in musical traditions from South Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, West Africa, Southern Africa, and the British Isles, as well as jazz, experimental, and traditional music from North America. In coordination with the Music Department and Arts Production, it also serves as the repository for recordings of music-related events on campus. Formats in the WMA include audio and video recordings on a wide variety of analog and digital media, manuscripts, printed documents and scores, ephemera, and photographic materials.

--
Aaron M. Bittel
Director, World Music Archives and Music Librarian
Olin Library, Wesleyan University

Orlando, Florida – BearManor Media is proud to announce the publication in early 2025 of Lawrence Schulman’s third book for BearManor Media, called Peter Allen: Somebody’s Angel – The Boy From Oz In The Key of Camp, which is a comprehensive overview of the late singer-songwriter’s career in two volumes. Schulman first published an initial article devoted to Allen in the Fall 2023 ARSC Journal, and it won the 2024 ARSC Best Article Award. Schulman thereafter revised and expanded the article into a chapter in his 2024 Bearmanor book FREE: Words on Music by a Hi-Def Critic in an MP3 World, which included new interviews and information. For the 2025 book, Schulman has further revised and expanded the article to include interviews with Bernadette Peters, Christine Andreas, Dean Pitchford, Lenora Nemetz, Michael Jay, expanded chapters, new photos, many published for the first time, and 13 appendices.

Born in 1944 in Tenterfield, New South Wales, and dead in 1992 of AIDS-related throat cancer, Peter Allen had a career that spanned from the 1950s, when he and Chris Bell formed a duo called The Allen Brothers that performed in Australia and Asia, to 1992, during which time he made albums and played such prestigious stages as Carnegie Hall and Radio City Music Hall. His extraordinary performances and brilliant songs are today somewhat forgotten, but Schulman’s new book was written to reestablish Allen’s importance to 20^th century American popular music and to put him in the ranks of George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen and others.

Lawrence Schulman, a graduate of Stony Brook University, the Sorbonne and CREAR, a school for film and video studies in Gouvieux, France, is a music producer, critic and translator who has compiled numerous CD sets devoted to Judy Garland in the past three decades. A collector and audiophile, Schulman has worked with such distinguished mastering engineers as Robert Parker, Jon M. Samuels, Gary Galo, Peter Rynston, Robin Cherry, Peter Reynolds, Nick Dellow, and Richard Moore. His talk on Garland, “Moments of Magic,” has been heard in New York, Boston, and various venues in Maine, where he resides. While living in Paris between 1971 and 1997, he taught and translated, and currently translates for the French website OpusHD.net, which specializes in classical high-resolution recordings. During his Paris years he also worked for French Public Radio as a producer and host. He has written sound recording and book reviews for the ARSC Journal since 1994, as well as three original articles, “The Plagued History of Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli ‘Live’ at the London Palladium, 1965-2009,” “Judy Garland: The Road Gets Rougher, 1960-1969,” and “Somebody’s Angel: Peter Allen, The Boy from Oz in the Key of Camp – A 21st-Century Reevaluation of His Music.” His most recent CDs are Judy Garland – A Celebration from Trapeze Music & Entertainment/Acrobat Music (2024), Judy Garland: The Two-A-Day Is Back in Town, Closing Night at the Palace, February 24, 1952 from JSP Records (2023), Judy Garland – The Lost Vegas Show from High Definition Tape Transfers (2023), Judy Garland – The Final Concert In Copenhagen from High Definition Tape Transfers (2022), Judy Garland – The Greatest Night in Show Business History, Carnegie Hall, April 23, 1961 from High Definition Tape Transfers (2022), Classic Concert Series: Judy At Carnegie Hall - Judy In Person  from AVID (2022), and Judy Garland – Live in Paris, 1960 from Frémeaux & Associés (2022). Finally, his translation from the French of Bertrand Tessier’s Judy Garland: Splendor and Downfall of a Legend, for which he also provided a Foreword, was published by BearManor Media in early 2023 and his own acclaimed best-seller, Garland – That’s Beyond Entertainment – Reflections on Judy Garland, with a Foreword by former ARSC Journal sound recordings editor John H. Haley and an Afterword by longtime ARSC Journal reviewer James Fisher, was published by the same editor in late 2023. His most recent book is FREE: Words on Music by a Hi-Def Critic in an MP3 World, which has also been published in 2024 by BearManor Media.

For further information, please contact: ben@bearmanormedia.com

This Member News feed allows member individuals and organizations to post news and events relating to their activities in recorded sound.

To post to here, go to Community>>Member News in the website navigation and publish your post.

Posts are visible to members and the public.