Established in 1966, members include record collectors, discographers, and audio engineers, together with librarians, curators, archivists, and researchers.

[1][2] ARSC was founded in 1966[3] 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.

Furthermore, ARSC was intended to bring together collectors from all genres, classical, jazz, popular, etc., as well as those concerned with spoken word recordings.

After three organizational meetings in 1965 and 1966, and the election of its first president, Philip L. Miller, Chief of the Music Division, New York Public Library, ARSC's first annual conference was held at Indiana University in March 1967.

Other important projects have included The Rigler-Deutsch Index, a union catalog of the 615,000 78 rpm holdings of five major public archives.

The eighth, the executive director, is appointed by the president with the approval of the board, is non-voting, and handles day-to-day operations.

[10] Cumulatively, approximately 1,200 papers and panels have been presented through 2015, and nearly all have been professionally audio (and sometimes video) recorded and made available to members.

The Preservation of Classical Music Historical Recordings Grants Program supports “the preservation of historically significant sound recordings of Western Art Music.” ARSC also provides a modest number of Travel Grants for first-time attendees at the annual conference.

Making copies of recordings is a violation of copyright law; therefore, libraries and archives may not legally be able to perform necessary preservation work.