DIY popular music archives and museums: Abstract accepted for the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia conference, December 2015

Friday 17 July 2015

Abstract accepted for the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia conference, December 2015

The 2015 conference of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia will be held this December at the University of Melbourne. The conference theme is 'Minor Culture', so one of particular relevance to a project that is looking at archival practices occurring outside mainstream heritage institutions. The conference will be a great opportunity to share some key findings that have emerged from this research and to get feedback from the cultural studies scholarly community.

The following paper has been accepted for inclusion in the conference programme:

Do-it-yourself institutions of popular music heritage: the grassroots preservation of popular music’s material past in community archives, museums and halls of fame

Sarah Baker (Griffith University)

Abstract

World-wide a burgeoning number of volunteer-run do-it-yourself (DIY) archives and museums are preserving the vernacular, local and global experiences of popular music's material past. Little is known about the characteristics of these archives and museums in a collective sense. This paper summarises the findings of several research projects that examined the ways in which cultural memory is captured within community archives. Specifically, this paper details the outcomes of a database that compiled information gathered on 41 community archives, museums and halls of fame. This paper discusses such things as geographical location, funding, staffing, mission statements, and the focus of collections. The analysis of this information reveals that many DIY institutions have similar characteristics, such as building types, and preservation aims, and face recurring challenges including funding issues and an ageing volunteer workforce. In summarising the properties of a large number of DIY institutions, the paper highlights the extent and significance of grassroots preservation activities that exist in parallel to the activities of mainstream heritage institutions.

Keywords: do-it-yourself institutions; community archives; community museums; popular music heritage; volunteers; halls of fame

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.