Talking DIY sustainability with Jez Collins at the Poplife conference

It has been an enjoyable two days at "Poplife: the value of popular music in the twenty first century", a conference hosted by the University of Northampton.

 

In collaboration with Jez Collins, founder of the online Birmingham Music Archive, I organised a panel that took place this morning and which seemed to be well received. The panel consisted of the following:

Panel 8

Music and Heritage

Room MY120

Jez Collins (Birmingham City University, UK) and Sarah Baker (Griffith University, Australia) - Sustaining Popular Music’s Material Culture

Paul Long (Birmingham City University, UK) - ‘Really Saying Something?’: What do we Talk About when we Talk About Popular Music Heritage?

Lisa Busby (Goldsmith's University, UK) - Editions of You: A DIY Archive of DIY Practice

Abstracts for these three papers can be found in this earlier post.

Jez and I are hoping to develop our joint paper into something more substantial over the coming months. The paper brings together Jez's interest in online DIY archives and my interest in physical places of DIY preservationism.

Here we are the evening before our panel outside Northampton's apt-named The Volunteer pub (right next door to the Public Lavatories):

In the presentation I concentrated on two of the archives I didn't have an opportunity to visit as part of the project, the now closed Jazz Museum Bix Eiben Hamburg and the British Archive of Country Music. I have raised the issue of sustainability of DIY archives and museums in relation to these two places previously on this blog, see here and here.