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The Dale A. Olsen Collection consists of over 800 audio and visual items that span Dr. Olsen's career as a researcher and educator from 1965 to 2007. They contain a variety of music from Japan, China, Indonesia, Persia, Africa, Ireland, South America, the Caribbean, and North America. While most of the recordings chronicle Dr. Olsen's extensive fieldwork in South America with Japanese immigrants and Warao Indians, other recordings include concerts by FSU world music ensembles, student and guest lectures, other special events and ceremonies, private gatherings at home, and even a handful of commercial recordings. About 80 of the reel-to-reel recordings were actually used as audio examples for Olsen's study of the connection of indigenous tribes to their environment, Music of the Warao of Venezuela: Song People of the Rain Forest, winner of the 1997 Alan P. Merriam Prize for "Most Outstanding Book in Ethnomusicology."

The Daniel M. Johnson Collection consists of approximately 5,200 books published between the 1780s to 2002 that are by and about Africans and people of African descent. The collection includes many first edition and signed copies as well as pamphlets, articles, letters and photographs. The major categories that Daniel M. Johnson delineated for his collection are: African-American literature and children's literature; African and Caribbean literature; African-American history and critical thought; African, Egyptian, and Middle-Eastern history; and African-American art, music, dance, and sports. The catalog includes 4164 nonfiction books and 907 fiction books.