In this post, guest blogger Lauren Istvandity provides an overview of a journal article written by Sarah Baker,
Peter Doyle and Shane Homan that emerged from the ARC funded project “Popular Music and Cultural Memory” and which was recently published in the journal Popular Music and Society.
***
The preservation of popular music heritage
is increasingly prevalent, not only in DIY spheres, but also in terms of
national collections. As Sarah Baker has shown through her current research, DIY
preservation faces a host of issues, especially in regards to sustainability.
However, authorized collections of music heritage, which are often seen as more
stable, are under a different kind of pressure when it comes to practices of preservation.
In a new article published in Popular Music and Society, titled “Historical
Records, National Constructions: The Contemporary Popular Music Archive”,
Baker, Doyle and Homan compare the practices of national popular music
collections in Australia, United States, United Kingdom, Israel, and Iceland.
Of particular interest to the authors is the ways in which these archives and
museums represent national cultural identity, in light of budgetary or
technological demands.
The National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) in
Australia is used as a case study with which other national collections are
compared. The authors interviewed workers and curators at these institutions to
obtain internal opinions on governance, archival practices, and other issues
impacting on collection and representation, such as copyright, artefact
selection and funding.
Conceptually, national archival
institutions should strive to acquire a wide range of artefacts in order to
comprehensively narrate the history and identity of the nation. This is
becoming increasingly problematic, however, in a modern age where there is more
historic information to be collected, logged, digitised, and stored, than ever
before. As an additional challenge, the governmental funding allocated to
national archives does not necessarily grow to reflect this change.
In the case of the NFSA, budgetary
restrictions mean the organization must streamline its collections, whilst
still trying to maintain a balanced representation of national identity. This
leads to a collections policy that advocates for the de-selection of material
that is not deemed significant enough to be housed in the archive.
Internationally, the situation is similar in Britain, although countries with
smaller populations, such as Iceland, are able to maintain more exhaustive
collections policies.
The issue of copyright within museums and
archives remains a complicated and above all, restrictive, matter in their
governance. In Australia, copyright law prevents sharing of copyrighted
material, such that archives may possess an original item, however in most
cases they are prevented from copying or loaning this material. Further to
this, the employment of peoples well-versed in copyright law within archives is
often countered by budgetary restrictions. Both collection policies and
copyright laws, as affected by budgets, impinge on the degree to which heritage
institutions can house comprehensive collections, and in turn how they fulfill
their role in representing national identity. Funding constraints are also felt
in other national institutions, such as in Israel and Britain, where the
labour-intensive processes of archiving are under-valued and consequently
under-funded.
Attitudes towards the role of the archive
in narrating identity vary throughout the world. It seems most heavily felt in
Australia, where NFSA workers voiced their feelings of responsibility in
collecting and preserving popular music heritage. A similar sentiment was
echoed by workers at the National Library of Israel, who feel their work is of
high significance. This concept was felt somewhat less strongly in the UK,
where the discourses of a ‘national’ archive are not as keenly communicated
through archival institutions. Throughout all of the museums and archives
investigated for this research, it was found that the presence of multiculturalism
complicated ideas of national identity, especially where such discourses were
not properly represented in the archive.
In a time where there is so much material
of popular music’s past to collect and preserve, there appears to be a dire
need for a renewed approach to archiving within national public memory
institutions. Indeed, if this is an issue for museums and archives in the
present, changes to copyright law, increased funding, and an overhaul of
collection policies in institutions worldwide is required to ensure the
sustainability of future preservation practices.
Reference:
Baker, S., Doyle, P. and Homan, S. (2015).
Historical records, national constructions: The contemporary popular music
archive. Popular Music and Society. doi: 10.1080/03007766.2015.1061336
