Article published on popular music heritage, canonisation and country music in Tamworth, Australia

Not strictly about DIY archives but my latest publication in the journal Popular Music -- an article about cultural memory and canonisation in Australia's 'country music capital' -- might be of interest to some readers of this blog. 

'Notes towards a typology of the DIY institution' - now available on OnlineFirst

'Notes towards a typology of the DIY institution: Identifying do-it-yourself places of popular music preservation', the article I co-wrote with Alison Huber (RMIT University), has now been published on Sage OnlineFirst. 

Conference paper: 'Archiving affectively'

Today I presented a paper (co-authored with Alison Huber) at the "Popular Music Heritage, Cultural Memory and Cultural Identity" (POPID) conference in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

What is a DIY institution?

As part of the research undertaken for the project 'Popular Music and Cultural Memory' (DP1092910, 2010-12), I visited a number or popular music archives and museums which encapsulated the spirit of DIY (do-it-yourself). Working with my colleague, Dr Alison Huber, we came to call these places 'DIY institutions' which we define as follows:

DIY institutions are places of popular music preservation, archiving and display that exist outside the bounds of ‘official’ or ‘national’ projects of collection and heritage management. These projects emerge instead from within communities of music consumption, where groups of interested people have, to some degree, undertaken to ‘do-it-themselves’, creating places (physical and/or online) to store -- and, in some cases, display publicly -- the material history of music culture. In these places, people (largely volunteers) who are not expert in tasks associated with archiving, records management, preservation, or other elements involved in cultural heritage management, learn skills along the way as they work to collect, preserve and make public artefacts related to popular music culture. These places are, we argue, suggestive of broader desires from within communities of popular music consumption to preserve popular music heritage. (Baker & Huber, forthcoming)