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The Matthew Lavoie Music Time in Africa Radio Show series contains 282 hour-long radio shows created by the MTIA producer and host between 2004 and 2011. Of this number, fifty-seven show recordings are duplicated in the Internet Archive. The series also includes fifty-one blog posts that Lavoie wrote for the VOA Music Time In Africa blog from 2007 to 2015. While the blog posts do not correspond directly to specific shows, they feature musicians, musical groups, and topics related to the content of the shows. The blogs are available on the VOA website. All of the show recordings are in digital audio formats, including a single digital file in the Broadcast Wave Format (BWF) and associated MP3 file for streaming access. The shows are not accompanied by scripts. The series is arranged chronologically by date of broadcast.

The Heather Maxwell Music Time in Africa series contains 404 radio shows created by the MTIA producer and host between 2012 and 2021. Of this number, eighty-eight shows are incomplete, missing either a full audio recording or script. Each show is a complex archival object composed of one .mp3 audio file for the full hour-long show and one .docx file for the associated script. The numbered sequence of 322 complete shows begin with Maxwell's first show on June 10, 2012 through the show of July 11, 2021. The series is arranged chronologically by broadcast date of show. Accruals are expected.

The Leo Sarkisian VOA Music Library Tape Recordings series (64 linear ft.) consists of 1,371 analog quarter-inch open reel tapes and 7,459 electronic files spanning the period from 1953 to 2000. The series contains the tapes that made up the main portion of the Leo Sarkisian VOA Music Library, which was dedicated on December 14, 2004. The library of recordings in various media was the storehouse of resources from which Leo Sarkisian and his successors Matthew Lavoie and Heather Maxwell produced the MTIA radio show until 2012. The series includes digital reproductions of a selection of tapes that are particularly valuable or unique evidence of Leo Sarkisian's field recording efforts in Africa. The University of Michigan created the digital surrogates between 2008 and 2012, prior to the transfer of the Sarkisian Library to Michigan for preservation and to support research and teaching. Inventory lists provide detailed descriptions of items in this series; they may be accessed in the Deep Blue repository and are linked here.

Leo Sarkisian built and maintained an extensive reference collection of analog tape recordings and a small number of paper reference items that he drew upon to create the Music Time in Africa radio show. The individual tapes are either 10" or 7" quarter-inch open reel spools of acetate or polyester tape stock. The content of the tape recordings spans five decades of Sarkisian's professional career as a recording engineer, practicing ethnomusicologist, and radio show programmer. This series consists of those audio tapes with an order imposed through archival processing that was barely evident at the point of physical transfer to the University of Michigan, but draws on a few basic observable categories that Sarkisian used to describe the music.

The series is organized into four subseries. The first subseries is the Index Set, named after a set of tapes that Sarkisian established in the early 1970s for some of his more valuable African music recordings. The subseries is organized by alphanumeric region codes (given by Sarkisian), and thereunder by country. The second subseries consists of digital reproductions of tape recordings identified by Leo Sarkisian as holding unique field recordings, and organized by University of Michigan (UM) barcode reflecting the sequential numbering system for digitized items. Associated metadata is available in an item inventory list. A large portion of the digitized recordings represent Leo's original field recordings. The third subseries is an extensive reference library of popular and heritage music from Africa, arranged alphabetically by country, language, or ethnic group. The fourth subseries consists of those components of the Sarkisian reference library that cannot be filed by country, and is arranged alphabetically by topic cluster and thereunder by tape name.