In 2001, the CSRC received a commitment for a $500,000 gift from the Los Tigres del Norte Foundation in order to establish a center fund for the preservation of Spanish-language music in the United States.

    The main project funded is the massive digital preservation effort titled the Arhoolie Foundation's Strachwitz Frontera Collection, the largest repository of Mexican and Mexican-American popular and vernacular recordings in existence.

    Other projects include a regular course offering on Spanish-language songwriting, an oral history initiative, and development of other collections on the history of Latin music in Los Angeles.

"For the true niche specialist, the Arhoolie Foundation, an offshoot of the roots label Arhoolie Records, has teamed with the University of California, Los Angeles, to digitize and store 16,000 78rpm and thousands more vinyl recordings of Mexican and Mexican-American songs from the first half of the 20th century. The collection won’t be fully restored until July, but fans of every conceivable genre of Mexican music can already visit the Web site (digital.library.ucla.edu/frontera) to hear 60-second snippets of old recordings, browse scans of the actual 78s and read notes on the performers. (Visitors to the UCLA campus can hear the songs in their entirety.) ... For all the fire the recording industry breathes about the dangers the Internet poses to their   survival, it's ironic that some of the oldest recordings are once again seeing the light of day thanks to new technology. 'I look forward to the day where I will be able to download the most obscure record in the world,' says Arhoolie's Tom Diamant. 'Whether it's a recording done in 1908 in Central Asia or the hardest-to-find-in-the-world Louis Armstrong recording. I think that's where this is going.'"