The Ukrainian History and Education Center Archives contain numerous audio recordings, 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 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 (speeches, concerts, church services, literary readings, etc.), radio programming of the Voice of America and Radio Liberty, interviews, and other materials.

These recordings were acquired primarily through donations of the collections of Stefan Maksymjuk and Mykola Francuzenko, as well as audio materials in other, primarily paper-based, collections.

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.

Selected digitized items from the UHEC's audio holdings are also available online below.

Stay tuned for some major improvements coming soon!

Thanks to an ongoing collaboration with Dnipro National University, many of these audio recordings now have detailed time-coded annotations and descriptions. You will soon be able to search these descriptions, and immediately jump to the relevant spot in the recording, as well as do searching and faceted browsing.