Bertram Lyons is Archive Collections and Dissemination Manager at the Association for Cultural Equity (aka, Alan Lomax Archive) in New York City, where he has worked since 2002. Concurrently he is completing a Masters Degree in Museum Studies/American Studies at the University of Kansas, specializing in digital heritage collections. While in Kansas he is assisting with the development of an audiovisual preservation program at the University of Kansas Libraries and he is the Berkeley Intern to the Director at the Spencer Museum of Art where he is implementing an archival program for the museum's paper records and digital collections. Bertram has served as both an intern and a contractor for the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, where he recently cataloged and processed Alan Lomax's manuscript materials and coordinated the organization, cataloging, and preparation of Alan Lomax's film and video collections for digitization and transfer to the National Audiovisual Conservation Center (NAVCC) in Culpepper, Virginia. On an ongoing basis, he is a consultant to the Alan Lomax Collection in the American Folklife Cetner at the Library of Congress.
At the Association for Cultural Equity (Alan Lomax Archive), Bertram budgeted and supervised the organization, digitization, and preservation of Alan Lomax's post-1947 field/research sound recordings and photographs, which included assembling catalogs and capturing metadata for all sound recordings, still images, and motion pictures in the archive. After completing the digitization of these materials, he coordinated transfers of the archive's original materials to the Library of Congress in 2004, 2006, and 2007. In 2006 he organized and completed a special project to digitize and catalog Lomax's 5,000 song sample Cantometrics dataset. Currently he manages special archive projects including an effort to establish contact with contributors to Lomax's cultural audio and film collections, and a global program to repatriate/disseminate cultural heritage recordings and photographs from Lomax's accumulated collections. Recent presentations and publications include "A working model for developing and sustaining collaborative relationships between archival repositories in the Caribbean and the United States" at the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) Annual Conference inSydney, Australia, 14–19 September 2008; "Finding Balance in the Management of Sensitive Cultural Heritage in Extant Recorded Sound Collections" in Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals, Alta Mira Press, Fall 2008; and "A Call to Reexamine Audiovisual Preservation" in Midwest Archives Conference Newsletter, April 2008, Volume 35, Number 4 (139), 22–26.