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Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

ARSC returns to Bloomington for 50th Anniversary

Members of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections welcome visitors to the organization's 50th Anniversary conference on Wednesday afternoon at the Indiana Memorial Union.

The Association for Recorded Sound Collections decided to bring it back to where everything began by playing host to its 50th anniversary conference on IU’s campus this week.

Bloomington was home to ARSC’s first conference in 1967.

This year’s event officially began Wednesday night with an opening reception at the Musical Arts Center, but workshops start Thursday morning and run through Saturday at the Indiana Memorial Union.

The conference represents a variety of professionals, including those who manage audio collections professionally as well as those who work on audio preservation and 
restoration.

There will also be producers and record collectors who are interested in scholarly aspects of recorded sound.

“Some of them represent major record collections in particular countries; others are purely private collectors,” ARSC conference manager Brenda Nelson-Strauss said.

The conference will feature 260 professionals from across the world.

Though it organizes a conference every year, this is the first to happen in Bloomington in decades, Nelson-Strauss said. One of the reasons is because ARSC President Patrick Feaster is an IU staff member and works for IU’s Media Preservation and Digitization Initiative.

“That’s another reason that we wanted to bring the conference back to Bloomington, because the MPDI facility is now up and running and we wanted people to be able to tour that facility,” Nelson-Strauss said.

ARSC held a workshop Tuesday and Wednesday for 55 people who work at the MPDI facility, providing background in things like how to repair audio cassettes and how to digitize videos.

Online registration is now closed, so anyone interested must register on site for the rest of the week.

A full list of events is available on www.arsc-audio.org/conference. There are also two free events taking place at 8:30 p.m. Thursday and 9:30 p.m. Friday.

On Thursday, there is an event called “Ask the technical committe,” which is open to anyone who already has experience with audio preservation issues. Friday, a group of record collectors bring records to trade, sell or just show.

“For local people, if they had any interest in recorded sound or historical recordings, this is a round table where they could attend and ask questions of experts,” Nelson-Strauss said. “And these guys know the answer to just about anything.”

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