ARSC was founded in 1966 by a group of academics, primarily music librarians, who felt that contemporary professional associations such as the Music Library Association (MLA) were not paying enough attention to the special needs of recorded sound archives, and that scholars were giving too little attention to historical recorded sound as opposed to printed sources. In contrast to professional organizations such as the MLA and the American Library Association, ARSC by design also welcomed private record collectors, since they held (and needed to preserve) many important recordings that were not present in institutional collections. Furthermore, ARSC was intended to bring together collectors from all genres, classical, jazz, popular, etc., as well as those concerned with spoken word recordings.