The project visits New York, Cleveland and Atlanta

For the last month or so, Sarah has been in the USA chasing interview leads and visiting popular music archives and museums. She began in New York City where she interviewed the folks who collect, catalogue and preserve the massive vinyl collection that is ARChive.

This was followed by a trip to Cleveland, Ohio, for a tour of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, and it's special exhibit 'Women who Rock: Vision, Passion, Power'. This visit coincided with the 16th American Music Masters week, meaning Sarah also had an opportunity to attend a series of events honouring the work of Aretha Franklin.

Next stop was Atlanta, where Sarah met with another of the project's partner investigators, Professor Tim Dowd. Unfortunately, some months earlier had seen the closure of the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in Macon, Georgia, a place Sarah had originally planned to visit. The closure of the GMHF is indicative of the serious funding issues faced by many small popular music museums in the US and elsewhere.

While in Atlanta, Sarah caught the Smithsonian's traveling exhibition 'Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment' at the Atlanta History Center, and also visited the  Georgia State University Library where she was given a detailed tour of the Popular Music and Culture Collection which houses many important artefacts relating to the lyricist/composer/performer Johnny Mercer.

Our project visits The Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision

Still in the Netherlands, from 30 September to 7 October Sarah was based in Amsterdam where she made a trip to Hilversum to visit  Beeld en Geluid, the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision.

Beeld en Geluid houses a massive underground audio-visual archive (reportedly over 70% of the country's audio-visual heritage), and the facilities are rather impressive as the photo below indicates:

In addition to its archival facility, Beeld en Geluid also hosts "The Experience", a range of interactive exhibits including a 'Pop Studio'.

Australian Country Music Hall of Fame, Tamworth

From 2-4 August, Alison made a return visit to Tamworth, NSW, this time to talk to the small team of dedicated folks who work at the Australian Country Music Hall of Fame.  Like the Victorian Jazz Archive she visited back in May, the Hall of Fame is an institution dedicated to preserving an aspect of Australia's music heritage which runs entirely on donations, grant funding, and the tireless work of its volunteers.  The Hall of Fame building (Tamworth's former Mechanics' Institute) houses a public museum space featuring changing displays about some of the many stars of Australia's country music scene, as well as an extensive closed archive of material artefacts related to country music and its cultural heritage.  Sound and visual recordings, costumes, instruments, photographs, magazines, posters -- and even a piece of historic railway track which is the subject of a country music song -- all have a home in the archive.  Alison was treated to the staff's kind hospitality during her visit, and was able to find out lots of detail about the work being done behind the scenes to preserve and display Australia's country music's past.  The archival collection has been recognised as being one of 'national and international signficance', following a Community Heritage Grant from the National Library of Australia in 2006, which enabled a significance assessment.

The Hall of Fame is located at 93 Brisbane Street, Tamworth.  For more information, visit their website, http://www.countrymusichalloffame.com.au

Victorian Jazz Archive

On May 31, Alison paid a visit to the Victorian Jazz Archive, which is located in the south-eastern suburb of Wantirna in Melbourne.  The archive has been around since 1996, and collects and preserves a huge range of artefacts pertaining to Australia's jazz history.  Volunteers are the backbone of this organisation, and they put on a very warm welcome, happy to share their passion for the archive's enterprise in generous conversation.  Alison was taken on a tour of the archive's collection which contains an incredible array of material, including recordings of all kinds, photographs, posters, magazines, books, clippings, and all manner of ephemera related to jazz.  While the archive is dedicated to the preservation of this material (and Alison saw lots of evidence of the meticulous work they are doing to preserve the material they are donated), its members and management team are also very keen to make this material accessible to the public, and so aim to operate as a 'living museum'.  They offer a range of outreach activities including archive tours, and they actively encourage members of the public to visit and use the archive.

The Victorian Jazz Archive runs entirely on donations, fundraising and the hundreds of hours of hard work donated by its volunteers.  Learn more about the archive at their website, http://vicjazzarchive.org.au/

Research at the NFSA...

Shane and Peter visited Canberra to conduct interviews with staff at one of Australia's leading national collecting institutions, the National Film and Sound Archive, in August 2010, and followed up with a few more interviews with folks in the Sydney and Melbourne offices in September.  They found out lots of fascinating information about how the archive works, the sorts of popular music artefacts the collection holds, how members of the public use the archive, and also heard about some of the challenges that the archive is facing in this era of digitization.  Staff at the NFSA were passionate about their roles as collectors of Australia's music heritage, and told us a lot about how their individual work practices contribute to the preservation of our cultural history.