Unlocking Historical Audio Collections is a collaborative project between Yale University, Stanford University, and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to provide bibliographic access to 78-rpm (pre-LP) recordings at all three institutions. Funded by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the project is contributing full-level MARC cataloging for commercial 78s in the Historical Sound Recordings Collection at Yale, the Archive of Recorded Sound at Stanford, and the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound at New York Public Library.

Between 2006 and May 2009, the project places a professional sound recordings cataloger in the libraries of all three participating institutions. These project catalogers are Diane Napert at Yale, Frank Ferko at Stanford, and Heeseop Regent at NYPL. Participants in the project have divided their cataloging activities according to the first letters of record labels in their collections, so that Yale is concentrating on labels beginning with A-D, Stanford on labels beginning with E-R, and NYPL on labels beginning with S-Z. Click here here for the list of record labels cataloged to date. For details of Yale University's sound recording cataloging practices click here.

The project is supplemented by pre-existing cataloging created by other institutions, such as the Library of Congress, and by informal partners such as Syracuse University, who are creating original catalog records for labels not yet cataloged by the project participants.

The catalog records created for the project are made available in each institution's online catalog, and all records are contributed to the national bibliographic database, OCLC. Cataloging for the project does not enhance or replace the Rigler-Deutsch Index records that were created in the 1980s. Nor does the project at this time provided digitized access to the audio content of the recordings. Instead, the project seeks to empower scholars by providing them with unmediated discovery of commercial pre-LP recordings in all fields, and the locations of these recordings in three of the largest audio repositories in the United States.

The project has contributed over 9,000 bibliographic records to OCLC through December 2007.