Collaborative practices employed by collectors, creators, scholars, and collecting institutions for the benefit of recorded sound collections

There is a long history of collaboration between private collectors and collecting institutions. Literature that discusses collaboration between these two groups typically focuses on the donation or sale of a private collection to an institution. Existing research focuses less often on the collaborative practices these two groups use to create, preserve, and access their recording collections. Furthermore, there is no scholarly work that aggregates known public-private collaborative practices. As a result, these additional practices are consistently underdeveloped and underutilized. For the first time, this thesis compiles a list of collaborative practices employed by private collectors and collecting institutions. Data was gathered through a literature review and a series of semi-structured interviews with private collectors and information professionals working with recorded sound collections. The constant comparative method of qualitative analysis was used to analyze the data. This thesis finds and discusses twelve collaborative practices employed by private collectors and information professionals. This study also discusses factors that encourage and discourage the use of these collaborative practices, the potential for their continued use, and ways in which future studies can extend the exploratory research of this study. This study’s findings contribute to the efforts of both private collectors and collecting institutions to preserve and provide access to the vast body of sound recordings documenting the multitude of historic and cultural perspectives necessary for scholarly and personal research.