Laurel Sercombe has been the Archivist for the Ethnomusicology Program at the University of Washington since 1982. She has co-produced a series of music recordings with Northwest Folklife, lectured for classes in Ethnomusicology, Library and Information Science, and American Indian Studies, and designed and taught a course on sound archiving. In 1998 she received a pre-doctoral Smithsonian Research Fellowship and in 2001 received her Ph.D. with the dissertation And Then It Rained: Power and Song in Western Washington Coast Salish Myth Narratives. She is a member of the Music Library Association, the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, and the Society for Ethnomusicology, for which she served as Current Discographer 1992–2000 and Treasurer 2000–2004. She serves on the boards of Jack Straw Productions and Northwest Heritage Resources. In 2013 she organized and hosted "Sounds of the World," a series of six programs for UWTV featuring film footage from the Robert Garfias Collection in the Ethnomusicology Archives.