by Liz Stover

Exciting news! After dreaming for years of digitizing the UMS archive, this massive project is finally underway! UMS has teamed up with the Ann Arbor District Library to digitize the UMS archive in all of its many forms: programs, photos, publications, and more. Please stay tuned as we continue to build and tweak a fully-searchable database for you to explore. Even more exciting are the innovative features we plan to include to create a “living” archive: the opportunity to submit your own comments, memories, and observations about events that you attended, whether that event was 50 years ago or yesterday! We’ll be asking for stories from patrons, donors, artists, ushers, staff, crew, and other UMS stakeholders to make this historical archive of the performing arts in Ann Arbor come alive.

In the meantime, please join UMS and the AADL for a sneak preview of the digitization progress in March!

A Sneak Peek into the Future of UMS’s Past:
100 Years of Concert Programs and Photographs

Sunday, March 14, 2010 at 2:00 pm

Ann Arbor District Library Downtown Branch, Multi-purpose Room

Join Ann Arbor District Library staff and Ken Fischer, President of UMS, as we launch two new online collections celebrating UMS’s concert history. We’ll show you how to browse and search thousands of pages of historical concert programs from UMS’s first 100 seasons; we’ll also unveil a growing collection of images that include both performance and rare backstage photographs of celebrated UMS artists over the past eight decades. Following a brief demonstration, Ken Fischer will present a talk on the history of the University Musical Society and the future of its archives.

Liz is Programming Coordinator at UMS and produces many performances and residencies on the UMS season.