Its holdings are primarily focused on audiovisual recordings relating to research in the academic disciplines of ethnomusicology, folklore, anthropology, linguistics, and various area studies.

In 2008, they participated in a small coalition of archivists and librarians at Indiana University that began a survey of the audio-visual materials held on the Bloomington Campus.

The survey was prompted by the recognition that the university held a large amount of time-based media in danger of deterioration and playback obsolescence.

This survey revealed that the Bloomington campus held more than a half-million audiovisual recordings across eighty units and that large portions of the university's holdings were at risk for loss.

[4] Based on the recommendations of the planning document, Indiana University President Michael McRobbie announced a 15 million dollar commitment to the preservation of audio and video recordings on the Bloomington campus.

Conducted primarily in Yiddish, the interviewees come from small towns throughout Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia.

EM offers access to Annotation Management System (AMS), which allows authors to upload audiovisual material and link it to content in their text.

The following two phases focused on the preservation of archive holdings and on the development of software tools for media assessment and technical metadata collection.