The fieldwork stage of this research has now come to an end. This blog post gives a brief 'statistical' overview of the fieldwork.
Since February 2013 I have visited 18 DIY Institutions, including archives, museums, halls of fame and combinations of these. My data set also involves five additional research sites from my earlier project, 'Popular Music and Cultural Memory' (2010-2012), taking the total number of sites I am analysing to 23. These fieldwork sites are located in ten countries: Australia (5), Austria (1), Czech Republic (1), Germany (3), Iceland (1), Netherlands (2), New Zealand (3), Switzerland (1), UK (2) and USA (4).
I have interviewed 125 workers in these institutions, the majority of whom are volunteers. In some sites I was able to interview a large number of volunteers (for example, 31 at the Heart of Texas Country Music Museum and 25 at the Victorian Jazz Archive/Australian Jazz Museum), at others only one or two. And of course, some of these DIY Institutions are the labour of love of only one person (such as KD's Elvis Presley Museum in New Zealand). A number of the people I spoke to were the founders of these archives, museums and halls of fame or were involved in the early days of the institution's establishment.
In addition to the genre-specific jazz archives (6) and country music archives, museums and halls of fame (4), the collections of the DIY Institutions of my study concentrate on popular music broadly, with one, the Sarasota Music Archive, being more heavily directed towards Classical Music. Two of the sites were artist-specific (the Ramones Museum and KD's Elvis Presley Museum) and another had an emphasis on recorded sound equipment (the Sound Preservation Association of Tasmania).
The full list of fieldwork sites involved in the project are as follows:
- Nederlands Jazz Archief, Netherlands
- National Jazz Archive, UK
- British Library Sound Archive, UK
- Klaus Kuhnke Archiv fur Populare Musik, Germany
- SwissJazzOrama, Switzerland
- Australian Jazz Museum (formerly, Victorian Jazz Archive), Australia
- Lippmann & Rau Music Archive, Germany
- South Australian Jazz Archive, Australia
- Taranaki Country Music Hall of Fame, New Zealand
- KD's Elvis Presley Museum, New Zealand
- Hector Country Music Heritage Museum, New Zealand
- Heart of Texas Country Music Museum, USA
- Queensland Jazz Archive, Australia
- Sarasota Music Archive, USA
- Rhode Island Music Hall of Fame, USA
- Ramones Museum, Germany
- Sound Preservation Association of Tasmania, Australia
- PopMuseum, Czech Republic
- SRA, Austria
- ARChive of Contemporary Music, USA
- Australian Country Music Hall of Fame, Australia
- Museum RockArt, Netherlands
- Tonlistarsafn Islands, Iceland
The next stage of the research will be coding of the data (interview transcripts as well as photographs, websites and printed materials) using NVivo 10 software.
