DIY popular music archives and museums: popular music and cultural memory project

Showing posts with label popular music and cultural memory project. Show all posts

Friday, 31 July 2015

Guest blog post: authorised archives --- overview of the article "Historical records, national constructions: the contemporary popular music archive"

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.

Forthcoming publication - a typology of the DIY archive and museum

An article on DIY institutions that I co-authored with Alison Huber has been accepted for publication in the European Journal of Cultural Studies. The article, titled 'Notes Towards a Typology of the DIY Institution: identifying do-it-yourself places of popular music preservation', identifies a series of commonalities that emerge across the DIY institutions we visited for the 'Popular Music and Cultural Memory' project.

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)

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.