Our mission is to stimulate cultural equity through preservation, research, and dissemination of the world's traditional music and dance, and to reconnect people and communities with their creative heritage. ACE is a living archive that puts its collections and works at the service of communities of origin, endangered cultures, emerging cultural leaders, students and teachers at all levels, and the scientific community.

ACE is custodian of the Alan Lomax Archive. We are currently updating and making Internet-compatible the Global Jukebox, the remarkable multi-media research and educational program spearheaded by Alan Lomax in the early 1990s. This will enable us to share the research paradigms, findings, and data of Lomax's research initiatives with musicologists, movement specialists, evolutionary anthropologists, and other scholars worldwide, as well as with the general public.