Documentation and archiving the performing arts
Issues of Intellectual Property Rights and Intangible Cultural Heritage

The American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) www.indiastudies.org is a consortium of leading colleges and universities in the United States. For more than 40 years the institute has provided fellowship support for post doctoral and PhD candidates in the U.S.

The AIIS has been recognized as an educational institution in India in its own right and been granted special privileges with regard to programs that bring undergraduates to India.

Over 6000 scholars have received AIIS support for research in a wide variety of fields in the social sciences, natural sciences, the humanities, the fine and performing arts. The AIIS has organised numerous conferences that enabled

 American and Indian scholars to meet.

• AIIS has two world-class research centres-
• The Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology
• Centre for Art and Archaeology.

In addition to these the AIIS has the following programs:

• Advance Language Programs in India
• Study Abroad Programs for Undergraduate students

The Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE) was established in 1982 by the American Institute of Indian Studies with the aim of developing a centralized archive of collections of music and the performing arts and to stimulate the study of ethnomusicology in India.

A major objective or establishing the ARCE was that collections of Indian music and other oral traditions are scattered throughout the world in personal and institutional collections and are not accessible in India.

Today ARCE has an archive of 25,000 hours of audiovisual recordings of the music and performance traditions of India and with a supporting library and facilities for reference and research. At the core of the archives are field recording collections deposited voluntarily by scholars and collectors. The collections are supplemented with detailed documentation.

The ARCE boasts of state of the art equipment and climate controlled vaults. The library of 10,000 books has books, journals, offprints and newspaper cuttings relevant to the study of ethnomusicology in India. The archives and library are accessible to researchers and interested individuals and institutions.