Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology (AIIS-ARCE), Gurgaon, India

AIIS-ARCE is the only one center of its kind in the country that serves as a resource center for researchers in ethnomusicology and related disciplines. Its archives are widely recognized among audiovisual archives worldwide as a model of their type. The core of the collection consists of audio and video recordings of performing arts of India, including also materials from South Asia that are relevant to the study of ethnomusicology in India.

The collections, representing 154 individuals and institutions, are all acquired by voluntary deposit. They range from classical Indian music and dance to rituals, epics, and ballads to regional and popular genres of performance throughout the country. The field collections also include journals, notes, photographs and other supplementary documentation. An important aspect of developing the archives has been to bring to India collections of Indian music and oral traditions that are held in archives outside India and hence unavailable to researchers in India. A recent addition in this area has been the recordings by the British musicologist A.H. Fox Strangways made in India in 1910-11, deposited at ARCE-AIIS by the National Sound Archives of the British Library, UK.

AIIS-ARCE's ethnomusicological collections are supported by a large collection of commercially published recordings ranging from 78 rpm phonodiscs to compact discs. The commercial recordings include a collection of world music as well. There is also a collection of documentary films, largely on video. The audio visual collections at AIIS-ARCE are supported by a reference library with a highly focussed collection of books, journals, articles and newspaper clippings that aim to provide a library for the discipline of ethnomusicology as well as background materials to aid the field researcher in India at a more detailed level.