LOS ANGELES — “Where’s Neil Diamond?”

Ken Shipley has hunted down some of the rarest records in existence as one of the founders of the Numero Group, a Chicago record label that specializes in painstakingly researched reissues of music from the obscure margins of pop. But on Friday evening he was zooming through Amoeba Records, the giant music store in Hollywood, looking for the Neil Diamond section. “I want to see what we’re up against,” he said.

Marc PoKempner for The New York Times

Numero is nominated for two Grammy Awards this year for “Syl Johnson: Complete Mythology,” a monolith of a boxed set tracking the works of one of soul music’s semi-forgotten figures, who is best known for singing on Hi Records, Al Green’s label, in the 1970s, and for his 1967 song “Different Strokes,” which has been sampled by hip-hop acts dozens of times.

Mr. Shipley is nominated in the best album notes category (against Mr. Diamond, for his collection “The Bang Years 1966-1968″), and the label is also nominated in the best historical album category. In a wide-ranging chat in a back room at Amoeba, Mr. Shipley and Rob Sevier, another of the Numero partners, spoke candidly about what the Grammys mean (and don’t mean) for a small label nominated in one of the dozens of non-televised categories, and what’s next for Numero.

Q.

What would a Grammy win mean for you guys?

A.

Rob Sevier: In our niche, we don’t know that there’s an actual measurable sales push that happens with the Grammys, and sales are what is most meaningful to a small label. It’s a new experiment for us.

Ken Shipley: The other side of that is that it does kind of legitimize our last eight or nine years of work in a mainstream sense. It says that if you do good work then it will be recognized by your peers.

Sevier: So, like, our moms?

Shipley: No, I mean in our community. If you were Grammy Award-winning producer Rob Sevier releasing a new LP, it means something more than just, record slob Rob Sevier.

Sevier: Sure. But at the same time I’m sure the transient hotels of the world have a few Grammy winners living in them.

Q.

Your categories are in the pre-televised ceremony, so if you win only a few thousand people at most would see you accept the award. Is there still any sense that winning it can have any big mainstream impact?

A.

Shipley: If you win there are probably 1,000 to 1,500 people sitting there watching you, and all of those people are somebody. This isn’t some Tom, Dick and Sally off the street winning a radio contest to come to the Grammys. These are people that are part of your industry, and you’re getting recognized by these people, who are going to say, “I don’t know who that is, but I’m going to look into it.”

When they say it’s “music’s biggest night,” it’s really the music business’s biggest night.

Sevier: We feel like outsiders here. Not in a bad way. But we live in Chicago, and our lives are pretty different from a lot of the guys we encounter here. I ride my bike eight miles to the office in the Chicago winter. These guys are living pretty good lives in their little corners of the industry. I’m not saying we’re never going to get there…

Shipley: I am.

Q.

So why did you decide to submit the album for the award?

A.

Shipley: Six or seven years ago we submitted two albums, and of course we didn’t get nominated. It’s not like our feelings got hurt, but it felt like a waste.

Sevier: We had to send, like, 15 copies of each album. And we were like, we’re not throwing away 15 copies of anything.

Shipley: It just solidified our outsider status. But then our work got better. We went from being a dinky little label to doing what some people consider important work. An acquaintance of ours, Henry Owings, a Grammy member who had won for the Charley Patton box set, said: “You guys, more than anybody, should submit for the Grammys, because you’re doing something new and interesting. I’m sick of having to vote for all this garbage.” So we submitted “Light: On the South Side.”

[That set was nominated last year for best boxed set, but lost to the White Stripes.]

Then when we did the Syl Johnson box, that to me felt like a superior work. Rob and I had been working on the research for close to four years, by the time it was finished.

Q.

And did you say to yourself, “I want a Grammy for this”?

A.

Shipley: I’d be lying if I didn’t feel that if this is our best work, we deserve it.

Q.

What’s next for Numero?

A.

Shipley: We are trying to take Numero and say, it’s not a record label, it’s a system. Rob has an idea to take music and apply it to the system, whether it’s indigenous people from Malaysia, or funk and soul from Toronto, or yacht rock, or garage from Mexico City. Or our next project, Codeine, a white indie-rock band from New York in the ’90s. It’s how we make records that is going to become more important to us over the next five years.

Syl in a lot of ways is a micro version of us being able to say, here’s one thing that we can do really well.

Sevier: It’s us saying that this is the substance with the best possible style.