DIY popular music archives and museums: Book proposal submitted, 'Do-it-Yourself, Do-it-Together: Preserving Popular Music Heritage'

Saturday 13 July 2013

Book proposal submitted, 'Do-it-Yourself, Do-it-Together: Preserving Popular Music Heritage'

A book proposal has been submitted for an edited collection tentatively titled Do-it-Yourself, Do-it-Together: Preserving Popular Music Heritage.

The proposed collection seeks to explore the role of DIY practitioners (archivists and curators) in the management of popular music heritage. Chapters will discuss the various cultural, social, economic, political and affective dimensions of DIY heritage practice, including a consideration of how these practices contribute to our collective memory of popular music.

The book will document a range of institutions of grass-roots popular music preservation, with chapters covering a range of countries (eg. Australia, Austria, France, Germany, Ghana, Iceland, Kenya, Malta, the Netherlands, UK, USA and Venezuala), music genres (eg. Country, pop-rock, jazz, folk and world popular music genres like ‘highlife’ and ‘benga’), and artists (eg. Take That, the Beatles, Elvis).

Chapters in the collection will consider both online and physical examples of DIY heritage practice across a spectrum of activity – beginning with the individual collector or fan who seeks to establish a place to share his/her collection, all the way through to the DIY institution that might have found enough funding for a few staff members and has become formalised to the extent that it is on the verge of national acceptance.

While Part One of the book will be dedicated to academic explorations on the topic, Part Two consists of chapters written by DIY popular music heritage practitioners. It is hoped that privileging community-based and enthusiast expertise in the book will provide a point of access into new ways of thinking about archiving popular music based on vernacular knowledge and a democratising approach.

Confirmed contributors to Part Two include: John Collins (Bokoor African Popular Music Archives Foundation, Ghana), William ‘Tabu’ Osusa and Billie Odidi (Ketebul Music, Kenya), Coromoto Jaraba (Proyecto Caracas Memorabilia, Venezuala), Dave Allen (Pompey Pop, UK), Jeff Blades (Victorian Jazz Archive, Australia), Barrie Brennan (Australian Country Music Hall of Fame, Australia), Bjarki Sveinbjörnsson and Jón Hrólfur Sigurjónsson (Tónlistarsafn Islands, Iceland), and Sheryl Davis (Re:Muse-icology, USA).

Other contributors to the book are Marion Leonard, Amanda Brandellero, Arno van der Hoeven, Susanne Janssen, Rosa Reitsamer, Rainer Prokop, Dave Laing, Mark Duffett, Anja Löbert, Stephanie Fremaux, Oliver Carter, Gérôme Guibert, Emmanuel Parent, Toni Sant, Thomas Herscht, and Jez Collins.

Hopefully a contract for the book will be offered within the next 3 months. Another case of ‘watch this space’…

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.