DIY popular music archives and museums: Forthcoming presentation at "Death and Life", a pop-up workshop in Sydney organised by Archive Futures

Tuesday, 3 November 2015

Forthcoming presentation at "Death and Life", a pop-up workshop in Sydney organised by Archive Futures

Later this month I will be presenting a paper on DIY archiving at a pop-up workshop in Sydney which has been organised by Archive Futures in association with the Australian Centre for Public History. The workshop, called "Death and Life", will be held on Friday 20th November from 2.30-5pm in UTS Building 10 (Jones Street), Level 9, Room 113. Places at the workshop are limited. If you would like to attend please email: samantha.encarnacion@uts.edu.au

The title of my paper is "Making community archives sustainable: safeguarding the long-term future of popular music's material culture". Other presenters at the workshop are Maryanne Dever (UTS) and Sarah Barns (University of Western Sydney).

The abstract of my paper is as follows:

Abstract
Case studies of Jazz Museum Bix Eiben Hamburg (closed 2013) and the British Archive of Country Music (at risk of closure) highlight the difficulties faced by community archives in sustaining their ‘do-it-yourself’ popular music heritage practices. The fragility of these institutions speaks to concerns raised by critics who believe that the collection and preservation of popular music’s material heritage is best undertaken by fully trained professionals in properly funded, authorised institutions. However, the significance and value of community archives goes beyond the artefacts being collected. At risk are not merely the artefacts relating to popular music’s material past but the very communities and accumulated vernacular knowledges that sustain popular music archiving at the community level.

If you are unable to make the workshop but want to know more about the issue of sustainable community archiving, you may be interested in reading a recently published article I co-wrote with Jez Collins (Birmingham City University) called "Sustaining popular music's material culture in community archives and museums" which appears in the International Journal of Heritage Studies.

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.