A Staff of 10,000

In 2010, ARC initiated a project of online data harvesting and sharing with Muslim World Music Day, celebrating Islamic music and culture (www.muslimworldmusicday.com). This first ’Day’ was accessed by more than three million people worldwide, ten months later still attracting 2500 visitors daily bringing together thousands of educators, scholars, artists, institutions and music fans.
The site used crowd sourcing and the web-based world to create the largest online catalogue of Muslim music (10,000 recordings), a 1000 video YouTube channel, 2000 artists/organizational links, three major seminars/symposiums, ten new blogs, over 100 radio programs and six academic papers featuring original research. This first ‘Day’ was awarded the ""Innovative Use of Archives Award"" by the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York.
Brazilian World Music Day, Sept 7, 2012 (http://brazilianworldmusicday.wordpress.com/) will be presented just prior to the IASA conference and attract even greater participation. ARC anticipates a database of 50,000 recordings (20,000 recently donated to our library) and 10,000 contributors. This talk will address access through large-scale projects involving thousands of participants and how any organization can create similar events to share information, initiate original content, create interest, educate and entertain. ARC will touch on non-traditional funding, creating partnerships between institutions and enlisting the involvement of commercial entities. It will also address data gathering in India for the Indian World Music Day to be presented in 2013.