In Lower Manhattan, sits a musical gold mine. It's the motherlode of recorded music though the small, brightly colored sign above a grey steel door provides only a cryptic clue. The dusty window display of rare 78 RPM records, broken into erratic pie charts serves as a vestige of the past and a cautionary tale about the packing of fragile items. Behind the fa?ade of this former Tribeca warehouse is The Archive of Contemporary Music (ARC), a nonprofit founded in 1985, and home to more than three million recordings, more than the collection of the Library of Congress and one of the largest archives of recorded music in the world.

Full-time staff includes director/co-founder Bob George, Fred Patterson—the resident jazz expert—and a position yet to be filled following the departure of another employee. Three to four volunteers are on hand at any given time and Mr. George typically recruits college students in Library Science programs, giving them hands-on experience in cataloging. And there is a lot to catalog. In 2012 ARC became a boot camp for Pratt University Library Science students who digitized one-thousand music books not available online. ARC, besides recordings, houses music books, memorabilia of all kinds, old concert programs, some equipment such as turntables, and other miscellaneous items. Some walls of the archive are obscured behind boxes of assorted items in the process of being organized. In a large room to the side, a volunteer staffer sorts through some of the seven-hundred-fifty-thousand 45 rpm records. For all the moving parts, the daily operations of ARC are busy but orderly. In these surroundings where music stretches as far as one can see, no music plays. It is as quiet as a library.

Bob George (who goes by the initial "B") is a native of Youngstown, Ohio. He attended the University of Michigan College of Art and Design before moving to New York in 1974, studying at the Whitney Museum. George co-directed