DIY popular music archives and museums: Publication of the edited collection "Preserving Popular Music Heritage: Do-it-yourself, Do-it-together"

Tuesday 19 May 2015

Publication of the edited collection "Preserving Popular Music Heritage: Do-it-yourself, Do-it-together"

The edited collection "Preserving Popular Music Heritage: Do-it-yourself, Do-it-together" is now in print, having been released by the publisher, Routledge, on 18th May 2015.

This edited collection which appears in the Routledge Research in Music series is the first major output from this research on do-it-yourself community music archives. It brings together scholars working at the cutting-edge of popular music heritage studies alongside DIY heritage practitioners who warmly embraced the idea of showcasing their archives, museums and heritage practices in an academic volume.

The table of contents is as follows:

1. Identifying Do-it-Yourself Places of Popular Music Preservation Sarah Baker
Part I: Unpacking DIY Popular Music Heritage Practice
2. The Shaping of Heritage: Collaborations between Independent Popular Music Heritage Practitioners and the Museum Sector Marion Leonard
3. Valuing Popular Music Heritage: Exploring Amateur and Fan-Based Preservation Practices in Museums and Archives in the Netherlands Amanda Brandellero, Arno van der Hoeven and Susanne Janssen
4. Affective Archiving and Collective Collecting in Do-it-Yourself Popular Music Archives and Museums Sarah Baker
5. "Really Saying Something?" What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Popular Music Heritage, Memory, Archives and the Digital? Paul Long
6. Doing-it-Together: Public History-Making and Activist Archiving in Online Popular Music Community Archives Jez Collins
7. Alternative Histories and Counter-Memories: Feminist Music Archives in Europe Rosa Reitsamer
8. "When Folk Meets Pop": DIY Archives in the Making of a Punk Rock DIY Community in Western France Gérôme Guibert and Emmanuel Parent
9. Creating a Comprehensive Archive of Maltese Music on CD Toni Sant
10. "They’re Not Pirates, They’re Archivists": The Role of Fans as Curators and Archivists of Popular Music Heritage Jez Collins and Oliver Carter
11. Coming Together: DIY Heritage and The Beatles Stephanie Fremaux
12. Trading Offstage Photos: Take That Fan Culture and the Collaborative Preservation of Popular Music Heritage Mark Duffett and Anja Löbert
Part II: Case Studies
13. Pompey Pop: Documenting Portsmouth’s Popular Music Scenes Dave Allen
14. Ketebul Music: Retracing and Archiving Kenya’s Popular Music William "Tabu" Osusa and Billie Odidi
15.Bokoor African Popular Music Archives Foundation: Ghana’s Highlife Music Institute and the Need for Popular Music Archiving John Collins
16. Proyecto Caracas Memorabilia: Reconstructing Pop Music History in Venezuela Coromoto Jaraba
17. The Australian Jazz Museum: All That Aussie Jazz—A Potted History of the Victorian Jazz Archive, 1996–2014 Ray Sutton
18. The Australian Country Music Hall of Fame: A DIY Museum and Archive in Australia’s "Country Music Capital" Barrie Brennan
19. Re:Muse-icology: Defining a National Landscape for the Study and Preservation of Rock’n’roll’s Built Heritage in America Sheryl Davis
20. Editions of You: A DIY Archive of DIY Practice Lisa Busby

The opening pages of the book can be accessed on Book2look and some sections are also available on Google Books.

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.