04/29/2026
As the semester winds down, ATM is continuing to introduce and highlight its student employees by letting them share some details on all the amazing work they do to help us serve our patron’s varied needs and fulfill our mission to preserve and disseminate the world’s music and oral traditions. Please say hello to Alexandra Maynard!
As a second-year master’s student in violin performance at Indiana University, my work with the ATM has been an enriching extension of my degree, offering me perspectives on music and culture I wouldn’t otherwise encounter.
My largest project at the ATM has been processing and digitizing over 5,000 archival documents related to ethnomusicologist and archivist George Herzog, the founder of IU’s ATM. This collection spans newspaper clippings, invoices, photographs, personal correspondence, advertisements for gramophones, and even materials like 1950s cod cake recipes. For each document, I scanned and cropped files, catalogued correspondents and dates, and wrote detailed content summaries. In the end, this became a year-long project that allowed me to engage deeply with Herzog’s life and work, as well as with the broader history of archiving itself—one of the most rewarding undertakings in my time here.
In addition to Herzog materials, I’ve also had the privilege of processing a wide range of recordings for Media Collections Online (MCO), including interviews with Hoagy Carmichael, Richard Dorson’s field recordings from Gary, Indiana, and materials from the 1901–1902 Jesup North Pacific Expedition to Siberia collected by Waldemar Bogoras and Waldemar Jochelson.
As I wrap up my time at IU, I'll look back at my time in the Archives with a lot of appreciation for the depth at which I could explore the contents that make up such an astounding collection of materials and sound recordings.
