About Us

Founded in 1963 with a collection of 150,000 recordings held off-campus under the leadership of Walter L. Welch, the Library's archive of sound recordings and related items has grown to over 340,000 items housed in a specially designed, climate-controlled facility on campus. Currently it is the fourth largest sound archive in the country and includes formats from the earliest experimental recordings on tinfoil to modern digital media. The collection of 22,000 cylinder records is the largest held by any private institution in North America, and one of the largest in the world.

The Belfer Archive also has equipment capable of playing back all of these formats, and performs preservation, digitization, and delicate restoration work on deteriorating recordings.