DIY popular music archives and museums: Abstract accepted for IASPM ANZ conference, December 2015

Monday 3 August 2015

Abstract accepted for IASPM ANZ conference, December 2015

The 2015 conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music Australia-New Zealand branch will be held this December at the School of Music, Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. With the theme speaking to 'Popular Music, Stars and Stardom', the conference will be a wonderful opportunity to share with popular music studies colleagues some key findings that have emerged from the research.

The following paper has been accepted for inclusion in the conference programme:

Popular Music Heritage, Community Archives and the Challenge of Sustainability: Is popular music’s material past at risk?

Sarah Baker

This paper examines the challenges of sustainability faced by community archives that are concerned with the preservation and display of the material culture of popular music’s recent past. The sustainability of grassroots sites of popular music heritage is of great concern due to their role in making accessible artefacts that often have limited representation in the collections of more prestigious institutions. The limited resources (financial, human, physical, skills, expertise) that are available to community archives pose a challenge for their long-term futures. A case study of the British Archive of Country Music, a community archive at-risk of closure, highlights the difficulties faced by the founders and volunteers of community archives in sustaining their ‘do-it-yourself’ popular music heritage practices in the medium- to long-term. The fragility of these heritage institutions, as evidenced by the closure of other DIY institutions such as Jazz Museum Bix Eiben Hamburg, speaks to concerns raised by critics who believe that the collection and preservation of popular music’s material heritage is best undertaken by fully trained professionals in properly funded, authorised institutions. However, the significance and value of community archives goes beyond the artefacts being collected. At-risk in community archives of popular music heritage are not merely the artefacts relating to popular music’s material past but the very communities and the accumulated vernacular knowledges that sustains popular music archiving and related activities at the community level. Achieving medium- to long-term sustainability for community archives in ways that are positive, equitable and non-prescriptive will be important if there is to be a comprehensive record of popular music’s material past as it was lived and experienced.

Keywords: popular music; cultural heritage; community archives and museums; sustainability

The paper will draw on and extend some of the collaborative work I have been doing this year with Jez Collins from Birmingham City University, including the article we recently published in International Journal of Heritage Studies.

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.