Beth McDonald has been hired as project archivist to catalog the records of The Georgia & Nolan Payton Archive of African Diaspora of Sacred Music and Musicians. The archive consists of music, books, periodicals, documents, audio & visual materials, and oral histories. The primary goal of the archive is to facilitate research and documentation of collections of African Diaspora sacred music (church music and religious concert music) created and/or performed by the multicultural population of Southern California. The Archival collections in this project include the Hansonia Caldwell Papers, the Nolan Archive Collection, and the papers of choral leader Albert McNeil.
This project will consist of traditional archival re-housing, arrangement and description including the creation of finding aids for two or more collections. There may also be selected digitization work with the use of CONTENTdm. At the end of the project, the employees will produce a finding aid published on the Online Archive of California. The Archives has received collections from the Sacred Music archives for 10 years. This is the first project to comprehensively catalog and digitize the entire archive. McDonald received her MLIS from UCLA and has worked at the San Francisco Maritime Museum as well as served as an LA as Subject Resident Archivist at three institutions in the LA area.