Skip to main content

Project Participants

The Arhoolie Foundation

The Arhoolie Foundation was established to preserve and promote regional or vernacular music created in the United States. It not only owns this immense collection of records, but also assists in producing film documentaries, exhibits, live presentations, and academic research to strengthen America's musical traditions for generations to come. Its Frontera Collection provides access to a rich vernacular music tradition and a window into Mexican American popular culture.

Founder and President Chris Strachwitz and a distinguished board of directors from diverse disciplines formed the Arhoolie Foundation in 1995. Once the collection is digitized, the Arhoolie Foundation will develop programs to introduce these recordings into U.S. classrooms.

UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center

Since its founding in 1969, the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC) has established a national reputation for cutting-edge research that makes a difference with respect to the growing Chicano and Latino populations in the United States. The CSRC Library houses the largest number of archival holdings in the U.S. on the Chicano-Latino population and received the first Diversity Award from the Society of American Archivists. The award-winning CSRC Press publishes policy briefs, research reports, oral histories, DVDs, books, and Atzlán, the premiere journal in its field. The CSRC also organizes free public programs on campus and in the community throughout the year, and it reaches an international audience through museum exhibitions. Current research projects focus on public health, education, law, economic security, media impact, and the arts. The CSRC hosts a competitive grant/fellowship program and the Los Tigres del Norte Fund.

UCLA Library

The Strachwitz Fontera digital archive is hosted by the UCLA Library, with expertise drawn from the Music Library and Digital Library Program. The Music Library is the central repository of music materials at UCLA, complemented by Performing Arts Special Collections, which houses one of the country's most significant collections of popular sheet music and sound recordings. Services to support metadata management, database and website development, and long term preservation of the collection are provided by the Digital Library Program.

The Frontera project team advises on technical and descriptive standards for the project, which ensure the persistence of the audio files and descriptive data that the Arhoolie Foundation and UCLA Library staff are creating. Digitization standards for both the disc labels and the audio files have been set at a high level to conform to emerging national standards in the field and to preserve the highest possible fidelity to the sound qualities of the original analog formats. The image and sound data files produced by the project are of a high quality.