DIY popular music archives and museums: Introducing the 'Music Archive Network'

Wednesday 3 July 2013

Introducing the 'Music Archive Network'

If you are interested in the archiving of popular music then consider signing up to the newly formed Music Archive Network. This network has been set up by Sound and Music, the Institute of Popular Music at the University of Liverpool and the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research at Birmingham City University.

As Jez Collins, activist archivist and founder of the Birmingham Music Archive, explains:

"Initially our purpose will be to create and invite people to a mailing list of those individuals, communities, institutions and organisations who have an interest in this subject matter. It is clear that there are many different approaches and practices in music archiving and therefore we are actively seeking to create a multi disciplinary group of people who can share their insights, passions, experience and ideas and ultimately for the Music Archive Network to foster relationships and partnerships that undertake project work together across the range of archives represented."

To sign up to the Music Archive Network email list click here or paste this link into your browser: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=MUSICARCHIVENETWORK

About the Project

This is the official blog of the Australian Research Council funded project: 'Do-it-yourself popular music archives: an international comparative study of volunteer-run institutions that preserve popular music's material culture' (DP130100317, 2013-2015).

Enthusiasts play a crucial role in the way that popular music and its culture is remembered. This project looks at instances of community-based, volunteer run archives and museums around the world which are working to assemble material related to popular music. It explores the contributions of these 'DIY institutions' to the preservation of these artefacts for the future.

Volunteers in such archives and museums who would like to participate in the project are invited to contact the researcher, Dr Sarah Baker, for detailed information: s.baker@griffith.edu.au

About the Researcher

Dr Sarah Baker is an associate professor in the School of Humanities at Griffith University on Australia's Gold Coast, where she is also a member of the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research.

Sarah is a cultural sociologist with expertise in popular music studies, youth studies and creative labour. She is the co-author of Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries (with Dave Hesmondhalgh, 2011) and Teaching Youth Studies Through Popular Culture (with Brady Robards, 2014) and co-editor of Redefining Mainstream Popular Music (with Andy Bennett and Jodie Taylor, 2013) and Youth Cultures and Subcultures: Australian Perspectives (with Brady Robards and Bob Buttigieg, 2015).

Sarah is also the editor of Preserving Popular Music Heritage: Do-it-Yourself, Do-it-Together (Routledge, 2015), an edited collection that emerges from this research project on community archiving and music heritage.

Research Collaboration

This research on DIY popular music archives and museums emerges from work I did with Dr Alison Huber for the project 'Popular Music and Cultural Memory' (DP1092910, 2010-12). Over the course of that project's research, Alison and I became interested in grass-roots, community-based places of popular music collection and preservation. The emergence of the DIY institution as a developing specialised repository for popular music's material culture, and the important work of volunteers in these places, struck us as something that required further investigation.

My collaboration with Alison has provided the foundations for this new project and our work together appears in our co-authored publications which can be found in this blog's Project Library, below.