Online audio access

Selected digitized audio is available through the UHEC Audio Collections web resource. In part thanks to a collaboration with Dnipro National University, many of these recordings now also have time-coded annotations and descriptions. Not all digitized audio is available online due to copyright or other considerations. Please contact us with any research questions.

About the UHEC's audio collections

The Ukrainian History and Education Center has one of the most extensive and important collections of Ukrainian recorded sound in the world, including

  • LP phonograph recordings of Ukrainian music and recordings by Ukrainian performers published in the USSR and the West. This collection spans all genres and covers the entire 20th century.
  • Early 20th century 78 rpm shellac discs of Ukrainian music and recordings by Ukrainian performers published in Europe and the United States. This includes extremely rare early pressings of Ukrainian opera singers such as Solomiia Krushel'nyts'ka and Modest Mentsinskyi, as well as popular recordings issued by Columbia, Victor, and other American labels.
  • Reel-to-reel and cassette recordings made from the 1950s to the early 21st century. Many of these are likely unique, and include live event recordings (such as speeches, concerts, literary readings, and church services), radio programming of the Voice of America and Radio Liberty, interviews, and other materials.

These bulk of these recordings were acquired through the donations of the collections of Stefan Maksymjuk and Mykola Francuzenko, as well as smaller donations (including the Andrij Vsevolod Dobriansky and Stefa Dobrianska papers) and audio materials in other, primarily paper-based collections.

UHEC is on Discogs!

The UHEC has launched a pilot project to test the feasibility of using the discogs.com website for the cataloging of its large holdings of Ukrainian and Ukraine-related vinyl recordings. These are in almost every conceivable genre: Ukrainian traditional, folk, religious, pop, rock, and dance music; works by Ukrainian composers; works by non-Ukrainians performed by artists of Ukrainian origin or background; spoken word recordings; and more. At this time, the UHEC's Discogs collection contains only releases that were already in the Discogs database. This is very much an ongoing project: not all of the UHEC's holdings have been checked against the existing database. Furthermore, the UHEC has many releases that are not already in Discogs and will require "primary cataloging". Therefore, the above-linked collection does not even come close to representing the full holdings of the UHEC.

Note that Discogs is in the business of linking buyers and sellers, so visiting our collection page will show "copies for sale". These are copies that other Discogs users have available for purchase. They are not the copies in the UHEC's collection.

Digitization status

Given that the expected lifetime of magnetic tape is about 50 years, the UHEC has launched a major "emergency digitization" initiative in order to migrate the reel-to-reel and cassette recordings to modern media. This project is ongoing, and is being done concurrently with the processing of the source collections as a whole. This is somewhat contrary to standard archival practice, but it makes sense given the idiosyncrasies of these particular collections. Until such time as full finding aids are available, we are providing the following spreadsheets with details on some of the UHEC's audio accessions. Some of this material is already digitized. If it is not, then we may be able to provide on-demand digitization of selected tapes or discs.

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