Library of Congress Announces Launch of “Professional Organizations for Performing Arts Web Archive”

I am excited to share the Music Division’s latest web archive collection, the Professional Organizations for Performing Arts Web Archive! This collection contains websites and select social media to document professional networks in the performing arts over time. The collection items are those of professional, labor, and advocacy organizations at regional, national, and international levels. Its initial batch of 85 archived websites is ready for you to explore in our digital collections. By the summer, expect at least 100! My seed list for the collection is quite large – over 500 unique URLs.

[Clip]

Our recently launched Performing Arts Web Archive and the LC Commissioned Composers Web Archive both have quite specific scopes. By contrast, I planned for the Professional Organizations for Performing Arts Web Archive to be the Music Division’s largest web archive to date and potentially for the foreseeable future. In a way, I think it’ll serve as another “heavy lifter” type of web archive collection akin to the Public Policy Topics Web Archive administered by the Researcher and Reference Services Division. Meaning, that the breadth of subjects and applied fields represented in the collection will become its hallmark value for researchers.

Why would this collection be big from the get-go? Think about how broad the performing arts are as a field and the many subfields within them: music, dance, musical and straight theater, composition, songwriting, theory, publishing, and education. Now, consider how all of those areas intersect with some of these topics, among others:

• labor organizing, like the Actors’ Equity Association
• historians, like the Society for American Music
• memory workers, like SIBMAS – International Association of Libraries, Museums, Archives and Documentation Centres of the Performing Arts
• medicine, like the International Association for Dance Medicine and Science (IADMS)
• technology and manufacturing, like the MIDI Association and MIDI Manufacturers Association
• religious studies, like the United Church of Christ Musicians Association

From the Web Archive’s “About Page

Collection Period: November 2019 to present (this is an ongoing archive).

Frequency of Collection: The majority of sites in the collection were targeted for capture quarterly or yearly with fewer targeted for capture monthly or weekly.

Languages: Collection material in English, with French, German, Dutch, Flemish, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, Finnish, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Hebrew, Persian, Romanian, Moldavian, Moldovan, Ukrainian, Iranian languages, and Norwegian.

Acquisition Information: Sites have been added incrementally since the project began and will continue to be added as they are identified.

Learn More, Direct to Complete Blog Post

Direct to Professional Organizations for Performing Arts Web Archive