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Prepublication version of:

Baker, S., Doyle, P. and Homan, S. (2015) 'Historical records, national constructions: the contemporary popular music archive', Popular Music and Society. doi:10.1080/03007766.2015.1061336

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Historical Records, National Constructions: The Contemporary Popular Music

Archive

Sarah Baker (Griffith University), Peter Doyle (Macquarie University) and Shane

Homan (Monash University)

Abstract

This article examines the contemporary role of archives in relation to the

curation and preservation of popular music artefacts, drawing upon

interviews with a range of archival institutions and popular music curators

in several countries. It explores the current technological, financial, and

aesthetic challenges facing curators and archivists in the era of digital

abundance. Previous strategies of “collecting everything” are being

revised, with more recent strategies of selective narratives of particular

national significance. This in turn presents further challenges for

institutions that wish to adopt more playful and innovative uses of its

material, particularly as pressures mount from the state to increase

user/visitor numbers. The article also explores how “the national” is

configured in these forms and presentations of popular music and cultural

memory, and where archives are situated between the music industries,

the state, and popular music fan communities.

Keywords

Music archives, music and national heritage, popular music curation.

Historical Records, National Constructions: The Contemporary Popular Music

Archive

Until the 1990s, the role of the public archive was largely settled, involving a range of

seemingly objective tasks. They were “institutions [that] have a responsibility to

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preserve documents and objects that reflect individual and collective endeavours and

that have had an impact on culture and society at national, regional, and local levels”

(Lloyd 53). Yet this has been disturbed in several ways. Past archival practices that

preserved and showcased formal evidence of statehood, modernity, and other central

aspects of regional or national life are increasingly under review. At the same time,

state archival institutions, aided by the significant turn to popular culture exhibitions

in museums and libraries globally, have increasingly taken up the fiscal and

administrative responsibilities in the housing of popular cultural knowledge. In

relation to popular music, the number of state funded sites for preservation and

display has grown (Cohen, Knifton, Leonard and Roberts). A parallel development

has been the growth in what Baker and Huber (“Notes towards a typology”) call “Do-

it-Yourself (DIY) institutions”; archives that emerge from communities of music

consumption which aim to augment and build upon “national” heritage strategies at a

community level and fill gaps that music enthusiasts-cum-amateur archivists have

identified in the public records collected at “authorised” institutions (Roberts and

Cohen).

This popular cultural turn has renewed focus upon not just how archives deal with

popular music’s material history, but how they engage multiple publics with this

material. The process of assigning significance through selection is not only

contestable and socially constructed (Lloyd 55); these concerns have become more

pressing as popular music researchers themselves become primary curators of city

histories (Leonard). This has led to more practical re-evaluations of the extent of

replicating canonic representations (the re-emphasis upon well-known historical

music events and figures, see for example Baker and Huber, “Locating the canon”);

the extent to which popular music should drive social histories of the local; and

whether to privilege the exceptional or the everyday (Leonard).

In addition, the construction of national popular music narratives remains a dominant

discursive mechanism: “the national” remains the simplest device for “categorizing,

controlling and finalizing” narratives and the most obvious means by which histories

are constructed as “uniquely national” that enables “specific national characteristics to

be retained” (Weisethaunet 190, 188). Assigning significance, and in particular

national significance, creates an illusory “fiction” of collective understanding, so that

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an item of documentary heritage, once designated significant, is deemed worthy of

remembering (Lloyd 54). This raises questions about the tensions between popular

music’s “continuous modes of national expression” [emphasis added] (Morra 54) and

the wider, larger international circuits in which certain recognized genres exist. As

Regev (2) has pointed out, “Anglo-American pop-rock music became the major

ingredient in the canon of popular music,” as the foundational points of reference for

localized adaptation. How canons of (primarily) Anglo-American performers,

recording stars and genres have come to be incorporated into national significance is

further complicated by local constructions of canons derived from “individual,

collective and institutional cultural memories” (Cohen 584). Cities have been more

prominent in the production and validation of popular music heritage, emphasizing

the various contributions of the local to national canons (ibid.).

Whether of local or national concern, “Once established, canons exert cultural power

by influencing memory and heritage … [they] influence the narration of the past, and

they inspire the radius of creativity for the future” (Regev 2). Given the relatively late

recognition of popular music by archives and museum sectors, the past is instead

already “pre-formed,” particularly where the larger cultural memory signposts of

Anglo-American tradition are concerned. For example, The Beatles’ 1964 tour of

Australia is inserted into the larger known Beatles heritage as much as The Beatles

are inserted into Australian pop practices and memories. In this sense, localized

instances and contact with canonic performers reinforce the gate-keeping modes

involved in their maintenance. Subsequent organized memories of such events are

both nationalistic and nation-building exercises.1 The recent The Beatles in Australia

exhibition constructed by the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney is useful here for its

reinvestment in a strange form of nationalistic pride:

The eruption of Beatlemania in Australia was more intense than anywhere in

the world. For thirteen days in 1964 the nation was held in a kind of euphoria,

captivated by the talent, the songs and the charm of the Fab Four on their

concert tour (Powerhouse Museum).

How Australians reacted perhaps more intensely than other nations to the band

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becomes part of a wider emerging mythology.

The exhibition also “looks at how Australians responded to The Beatles and the tour’s

lasting impact on Australian music and culture” (ibid.). The tour has shaped

understanding of subsequent events in Australia, in the local turn to groups who wrote

their own songs (and the momentary demise of individual performers who sang

others’ compositions); the flurry of Beatles-esque local hits in the charts, and so on.

Such exhibitions remain interesting for the ways in which they participate in building

consensus about national characteristics, and as gatekeepers in the active creation,

mediation, interpretation and shaping of relationships between the historical

global and national.

The challenges confronting national institutions are not simply ones of gatekeeping,

but also of technology (Gilliland). The incredible rise in open source and other digital

software information systems has created alternative archival practices of popular

music (see Collins and Long). Karaganis, for example, argues that,

… the convergence of experiential critique, institutional conflict, and new

intellectual entrepreneurship has fostered an explicit and often contentious

public debate about the organization of culture and the nature of cultural

authority in the digital era (Karaganis 10).

In short, the music archive must confront internal questions about sourcing and

retaining digital artefacts; and external questions about the role of digital popular

culture sites performing alternative roles as archivists. The primacy of the online

search engine in contemporary cultures similarly challenges the archive as central

cultural heritage authorities. It also of course raises questions about what

digitalization does in mediating the past. A recent Australian academic report on

digital policy recognised a need to go “[b]eyond merely acknowledging user agency”

and to “account for the shifts and modulations of user agency, and the way that

platforms and policy can accentuate or delimit that potential” (Crawford and Lumby

10).

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In this article we narrow our focus to three core issues that arise across the archival

narratives: the acquisition of artefacts in the pursuit of completeness; the impact of

financing on collection and preservation priorities; and the role of archives in the

narration of national identity. As ours was a multinational project the article is

necessarily comparative. However, there is also value in an in-depth case study

approach in drawing out in more detail certain specific contexts in which popular

music archiving occurs and the ways in which archivists navigate institutional policies

and practices. Thus we begin the article with a case study of Australia’s National Film

and Sound Archive (NFSA) where a large proportion of our data gathering took place.

The article then looks to provide global comparison, taking the reader deeper into a

consideration of how those three core issues play out in quite different cultural and

national contexts. Though the authors do not intend to suggest generalisations can be

made beyond the archives in our fieldwork, the international comparison does point to

a number of similarities in how various archives address the development, collection,

preservation, maintenance and promotion of a nation’s popular music heritage. To

begin, however, we provide some background to the research on which this article is

based.

Methodology

The article draws on in-depth qualitative interviews undertaken with archivists and

music librarians between 2010-2012 as part of a multinational Australian Research

Council funded project, Popular music and cultural memory: Localised popular music

histories and their significance for national music industries.2

The project sought to

identify and critique the ways in which localised popular music histories are produced,

and how these are placed within broader national and international histories. The project

researchers were particularly interested in the role of formal and informal archives in

the preservation and construction of national popular music histories. Interview

questions largely focussed on archival functions, processes and practices as well as on

the value of preserving popular music’s material culture. All interviews were

undertaken on-site at the archive in which the interviewee worked.

In addition to interviews with 15 staff from Australia’s National Film and Sound

Archive, all who primarily worked with the music collection, interviews were

conducted with an additional 10 archivists and music librarians at the National Sound

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Archive at the National Library of Israel, the British Library Sound Archive (UK),

Georgia State University Library Special Collections and Archives (USA), and the

music and audio collection at the National and University Library of Iceland.

Interviews were also conducted in broadcast and industry archives, including the EMI

Archive Trust (UK), the British Broadcasting Corporation Sound Archive (UK) and

the radio and television archives of the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service,

Ríkisútvarpið (Iceland). The international archives were selected for inclusion in the

project based on their proximity to the project’s partner investigators in those

countries. Combined, these archives are broadly representative of the types of popular

music archiving that take place in “authorised” archives globally as well as those

seeking “authorised” status (see for example Isabirye; Linehan; Mäkelä; Zevnik);

authorised archives being those which tend to be sanctioned by and/or substantially

sponsored by government bodies and which engage in “‘big H’ Heritage” (Roberts

and Cohen 4).

We consider these popular music archives as authorised institutions at the intersection

of personal, social and industrial memory. Indeed, for many of our interviewees their

responses to our questions reflected an overlapping of roles in which in addition to

their position as archivist/librarian they could also situate themselves as fan, collector,

musician, and/or broadcaster. These other positions enable them to reflect on their

work as archivists and librarians but also feed into their archival practices and

decision making within the confines of the institution’s collecting remit. This has

ramifications beyond the archive to cultural memory more broadly in that their

practices have the power to frame the social, material and cognitive remembering of

popular music’s past (Erll and Nunning). As Strachan points out, “the very act of

collection and protection serves to construct particular narratives which prioritize,

valorise and exclude” (Strachan 7). Yet these were not “personal” interviews, as such.

At their heart was the desire to unpack the institutional agendas that are the focus of

this paper. The often frank responses of our interviewees enable us to explore here

some of the challenges facing popular music archives across the globe, including the

technological (shifts from analogue to digital), the social (the agendas and practices of

collection), the regulatory (government agendas and funding) and the cultural

(framing of the “national”) issues. It is important to understand these dimensions of

popular music archiving in authorised institutions given these archives will likely be

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central to “what can be said in the future about the present when it will have become

the past” (Assmann, “Canon and archive” 102).

Case Study: The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

Established in 1984, the National Film and Sound Archive (the NFSA) is located in

the Australian capital of Canberra, close to other national institutions including the

Australian National University, the national Parliament and the Australian High

Court. It holds over 1.9m works and “aims to develop a collection that has enduring

cultural significance” (NFSA, “About us”) that is “a reliable source of authentic

evidence of Australia’s audio-visual heritage” (NFSA, “Annual Report”).3

As an active collecting institution, the NFSA is obliged to continually make decisions

regarding individual acquisitions and more generally its acquisition policy, or

philosophy. These decisions hinge in large part on precisely the type of “archive” the

NFSA in fact is. The term “archive” embraces a broad spectrum of different functions

and procedures, and the NFSA is located philosophically in a somewhat necessarily

ambiguous part of that spectrum. At one end are the large systematic storage and

retrieval facilities, such as the National Archives of Australia or State Records of New

South Wales, operating under statute to collect and store official records, documents

and materials, and within the constraints of access guidelines and regulatory

frameworks, make those materials available to authorised users. Other archives and

archive-like collections may also have “legal deposit” functions – aiming to collect, as

in the case of National Library of Australia (and the various state libraries), all printed

works published in the Commonwealth (see https://www.nla.gov.au/legal-deposit.)

Sometimes the staff of large public libraries and collecting institutions without a

specific legal deposit charter do nonetheless seek to collect as much material as

possible entering the public domain, within certain categorical constraints. These

archive-keeping or collection functions might operate alongside interpretation and

public exhibition functions, which might include “user friendly” web access

functionality, and sophisticated education programs and publications, all aimed at the

general public and not solely in the service of formal authorised researchers and users.

For the latter type of organisation (which includes Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum,

hosting institution of important popular music heritage exhibitions including Real

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Wild Child, Spinning Around and the Beatles exhibition discussed above) the

relationships between collection/acquisition and exhibition/interpretation functions

needs to be continually negotiated, and these discussions in turn feed back into (and

are determined by) funding decisions and allocation of resources within the

organisation.

The NFSA acquisitions policy is sufficiently non-specific and non-prescriptive4 as to

necessitate considerable case-by-case decision making by curators and archivists. The

organisation is the primary, most highly funded and highest prestige national, public

body involved with collecting sound material (but not the only such “sound and music

archive/museum”). In talking to NFSA staff, policies and philosophies of popular

music collection and acquisition are a major preoccupation.

Apart from its general music collection, including the Australian Jazz Archive, the

NFSA promotes its role through annual announcements of additions to its National

Registry of Recorded Sound, “Sounds of Australia,” spoken word or music recordings

deemed to be of national/historical significance. NFSA holdings and the professional

expertise of its staff have been drawn on in a few major historical exhibitions, such as

Spinning Around, the retrospective on Festival Records (opened by Olivia Newton-

John in 2001 and curated by Peter Cox at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney). It has

also played an important role as a safe site for bands to deposit their master recordings

(the former Australian Arts Minister, Peter Garrett, requested to see how and where

his band Midnight Oil’s masters were stored). Its employees see the NFSA as part of

Australia’s “national memory” (NFSA worker, Canberra, 2010). There was strong

consensus about how music can strongly reflect and explain, as another staff member

stated, “people’s culture” and that of the everyday. As another staff member put it:

It allows people to not only have their own dialogue in their head with their

memories … all these interesting secondary things come out of that, from the

people who were part of that scene, or the audience, or the fans, plus new artists

or people studying these periods (NFSA worker, Canberra, 2010).

In general, the NFSA seeks to:

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… get a copy of every CD released in the country. The minute we say, “oh

we’re not interested in everything,” I think we’ve abrogated our responsibility.

You know, we’ll never get everything, but I think we’ve got to have that as the

aspiration (NFSA worker, Canberra, 2010).

The NFSA has arrangements with many recording labels for regular deposits of new

material, supplemented by a working relationship with Triple J, the national youth

radio station, and requests from selected festivals. In addition, “significant

individuals”—well known musicians and collectors—are regularly contacted. There

has been more recent emphasis upon increasing the indigenous music collection

through interviews with key performers:

Blackfellas have been doing it from Harold Blair [opera singer] through to

Johnny Nichol [jazz guitarist] through to [contemporary pop star and film

actress] Jessica Mauboy … in an Encyclopedia of contemporary music, the only

mention you’re going to get of blackfellas is Yothu Yindi, a one-pager, or

maybe [the] Warumpi [band] … I understand that’s a history, but it needs to

look at a broader context and actually look at contributions by indigenous

musicians (NFSA worker, Canberra, 2010).

However, the NFSA’s role as the national house of last resort for all types of material

is increasingly threatened on several, interrelated fronts. Firstly, the digital age has

raised concerns about its ability to both find and retain a copy of all material:

Exciting new music comes out of the sheer ease of being able to record and

release your own recording – whether on a physical object or whether it’s just

there as a track you can listen to on a MySpace page or download off iTunes …

that in itself poses a whole new set of problems for us. If we’re not getting the

physical CD, and all we’ve got is a digital file, uh, you know, how do we find

them? (NFSA worker, Canberra, 2010).

These issues reinforce its gatekeeping role and the need for continual judgements

about significance: “if it’s a crap format, unless it’s extremely significant it’s going to

cause us more problems” (NFSA worker, Canberra, 2010). Another senior curator

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believes that “the new generation of music makers are going to slip through our net

unless we change our net fairly radically” (NFSA worker, Canberra, 2010). In terms

of film, it has acquired new equipment to digitise older film stock. The need to make

the right choices has been further sharpened by successive federal government budget

cuts to the archives sector, including the NFSA, in the past five years. A proposal for

a joint digitalisation program with the National Library and National Archives was

shelved. The federal Arts Minister Simon Crean exempted the NFSA from a further

2.5% cut in the 2011-2102 financial year (NFSA, “Annual report” 16). At the time of

writing, the new federal conservative government has stated its intention to merge the

“back office” activities of all the major cultural institutions in Canberra, including the

NFSA, to provide AU$2.4m in savings (Pryor and Towell).

Secondly, copyright remains a serious obstacle to collection processes in two ways.

While music companies are happy to provide copies of product for storage and access

on site, they remain deeply reluctant to relax copyright for other uses and users. This

leaves the archive with difficult choices, prohibited from copying radio and TV

programs, and unable to gain access to broader contemporary music sites:

iTunes, for example – great aggregator, you’d think it’d be the perfect place for

us to go to get that material. Big problem – anything we download from iTunes

has Apple’s DRM built into it, and they are not going to share that code with us

… we can’t manage it in the way that we need to ensure its preservation, let

alone provide access to it … MySpace is another area where there’s a lot of

music we’d be interested in collecting, but to be able to actually do anything

with it, we have to go and talk to those artists, so we’re back to one-by-one

[approaches] (NFSA worker, Canberra, 2010).

These problems were flagged in the 2012 Copyright and the Digital Economy Issues

Paper produced by the Australian Law Reform Commission. It was suggested that

amendments to the Copyright Act that would allow either a collective licensing

model, or a broader exception under “fair use” exceptions, where the “use does not

interfere with the copyright owner’s market” were of most use in the era of digital

abundance (ALRC 43). This may be a useful option in broadening out use; we were

also informed by the NFSA that the existing copyright laws prevent community radio

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stations, even as not-for-profit cooperatives, from using the archive in a range of

ways. Law changes would also free up other options:

I have one artist who is talking about donating multi-track tapes with basically

free licence to the NFSA to make them available for non-commercial use, so

you could look at doing things where students could mash up and remix that

kind of material. It’s been the kind of thing we’ve talked about for a long time

but actually getting people to release their material to allow you to do that is

very difficult (NFSA worker, Canberra, 2010).

The Chief Executive Officer of the NFSA, Michael Loebenstein, highlighted these

issues, particularly how the “obsolescence of legacy formats and of technology” and

current copyright constraints were combining within the “Digital Deluge” from

artists, collectors and fans, to limit their ambitions (NFSA, “Annual report” 15).

More than one NFSA employee we interviewed referred to resolving tensions

between collection/preservation, and increasing access to interested citizens and

organizations. One tactic is to be more strategic about the presentation of material,

focussing upon context and ensuring that the archive plays a greater role in producing

stories that are symptomatic of larger debates and issues,

… finding something interesting … [and] … stimulated by, ooh, that’s a nice

recording, and then you realize that there’s that one little keyhole into a wider

area (NFSA worker, Canberra, 2010).5

A long term NFSA staff member (based in Sydney as opposed to Canberra, where

most of the interviewees were placed6) expressed a counter view in particular to the

“broad brush” policy of comprehensive collection/acquisition (the philosophy almost

unanimously endorsed by Canberra based NFSA staff), favouring a more context-

focussed acquisitions policy:

I’m very concerned about the “vacuum cleaner approach”. This isn’t necessarily

a party line in terms of the National Film and Sound Archive’s policy, but I

think sometimes less is more. It’s about looking at more detail – knowing what

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you’ve got more, and having a better handle on that and going a bit deeper, is

something that I would like to see, and I think as we go forward into this, this

kind of crazy media environment where there’s just so much content creation, I

think that’s going to be the challenge ahead, is to have, um, to make those hard

decisions, and go – obviously we can’t keep everything, and go, “this is

important, and we’re going to focus on that” (NFSA worker, Sydney, 2010).

Rather than unreservedly agreeing with the policy whereby the NFSA simply collects

all commercially issued music in Australia – which he argued is impossible to

achieve, and becoming even more so with digitalization – he advocated procedures

and interventions involving greater degrees of interpretation and selection. This

particular archivist happens to have close relationships, also as friend and colleague,

with a number of documentary filmmakers, authors, museum curators, radio

presenters, researchers and other media people, and is known to on occasion take a

proactive role, successfully steering producers onto particular items or whole bodies

of interesting but little known material held by the NFSA. (He took just such an

advisory role in regard to the Real Wild Child and Spinning Around exhibitions at the

Powerhouse Museum, and in the background research to the book and documentary

film Buried Country).

This archivist went on to advocate that the NFSA in its collection work should focus

more narrowly, and more deliberately:

I actually wonder about trying to collect everything as it’s coming out, because I

think in some ways the dust will settle on this stuff in ten or twenty years time.

Everyone has access more or less now to some sort of recording device and

technology, or storage (NFSA worker, Sydney, 2010).

Instead, he argues that:

my personal thing would be to be looking at early recordings, and indeed a lot

of unpublished recordings as well... focusing as well on material that we can

provide access to and use because, well, we can’t provide access to

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contemporary published recordings, probably for another seventy years (NFSA

worker, Sydney, 2010).

The NFSA according to this view should focus on also collecting material which is

ancillary to the actual audio recordings:

I also think that it’s vital [to collect] the documentation that surrounds the

recording. …it might be things like the artwork, the posters for the gigs, and

indeed a lot of the stuff surrounding the whole business of the music

business…Of course the record companies have traditionally kept that very

much to themselves, and under wraps. Right down to things like radio station

playlists and things like that (NFSA worker, Sydney, 2010).

Whereas the Canberra-based NFSA archivists and curators tended to work with, or

towards what might be regarded as the canons of Australian popular music (which

have largely emerged over the past two decades), the Sydney worker was clearly

more interested in the less investigated or forgotten corners of Australian popular

music history and practice.

If you’re looking at World War I – to know the songs of those times and to have

those recordings – it gives you a real insight as it does with World War II … I

think it’s very important to understand the whole cultural context of that time

(NFSA worker, Sydney, 2010).

Rather than restricting itself to audio recordings, the NFSA should attend equally to,

in the opinion of this archivist,

…the way that the record companies evolved. [We should collect] paperwork,

including things like business statements, and accounts, so that [researchers] can

actually understand the business. I mean just collecting the records, and

focusing on the stars – well, that kind of has been done (NFSA worker, Sydney,

2010).

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Speaking of the proposed Slim Dusty Centre museum, under construction in rural

Kempsey on the North Coast of New South Wales, he continued,

In a way the actual songs are really just the tip, the icing on the cake. We’re also

looking at … film materials. It might be the Kempsey floods, or dairy farming,

or old vaudeville performers. A lot of the oral history interviews, and not just

with Slim, but with some of his contemporaries. There’s a mountain of other

ways to provide the context and to tell that story (NFSA worker, Sydney, 2010).

The NFSA is also working towards further public relations strategies aimed at

reminding the public that an extensive sound archive in fact exists: plans are in train

to begin more website stories based on music snapshots related to different periods of

Australian life. It also speaks to CEO Michael Loebenstein’s call for a “strong

entrepreneurial agenda” that includes increasing “non-appropriation” revenues

(NFSA, “Annual report” 16). Staff estimate that only 10 to 12% of visitors and access

requests are music-related; its role as the national film archive still casts a long

shadow:

I think that’s one of the greatest challenges that the archive faces, if nine times

out of ten, people think that we don’t have something, [and] we do, but it’s so

hidden or a spotlight’s never been shone on it, we actually just need to index it

better or preserve it or copy it or write about it (NFSA worker, Sydney 2010).

In some ways, the disconnects between this Sydney-based NFSA worker and the

Canberra staff interviewed make manifest Lloyd’s assertion that

The process of naming a document or object as significant will always reflect

the directions and consciousness of a society’s dominant groups…. Thus the

voices of a community’s minority or special interest groups will be silenced. …

[N]either the concept of significance nor the process of assessing significance is

benign; both should be seen as areas of tension and contestation (Lloyd 53).

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The processes of archival selection, preservation and inclusion, no matter how skilled

or of good faith are the agents involved, inevitably create new shadows, new zones of

otherness and forgetting. In some ways it could be said the NFSA accomplishes a

constructive embracing of current debates regarding significance within the

organisation, with the Sydney-based NFSA worker using his not inconsiderable

personal status and cultural capital to perform a role of free-ranging advocate for the

marginal, in a collegial, dialectical relationship with the Canberra head office. As

Derrida contends in Archive Fever, “the archive is itself a reflection of both the

archive keeper and the power structures of which the archive keeper is a

representative” (Prescott 130). This is evident in our case study of the NFSA.

International Comparisons

Our brief examination of the NFSA reveals some of the central problems for an

authorized institution. Within recurring diminishing budgets, internal debates have

been ongoing about how—and what—to collect that is appropriate to its remit as the

nation’s primary film and sound repository. As we have argued, much of the

discursive work framing the “Australian story” of pop and rock pre-exists the cultural

turn to popular culture archives, meaning that in some ways, the selection of

“important” materials and sounds has followed established narratives in written and

oral histories. Nonetheless, several of the workers we spoke to were more than aware

of the institution’s ability to be more adventurous in terms of presenting other musical

and industrial contexts.

The NFSA workers also revealed the ways in which such institutions can play

important roles in presenting globally recognized events and genres (such as World

War I and country music) in very specific national or local forms. Heading the canon

of Australian country music as a continuous performer who recorded 106 albums

before his death, one NFSA worker above reminded us that Slim Dusty’s career

cannot be understood without similarly understanding his small town background, or

Australia’s early vaudeville performances on stage and on radio.

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We were similarly interested in the extent to which NFSA thoughts and practices

about such choices were also to be found in other national contexts. In providing an

international comparison in this section, we focus on the three central issues that were

raised above: the attainment of artefacts in the pursuit of completeness; the impact of

financing on collection and preservation priorities; and the role of archives in the

narration of national identity. Further, beyond the usual problems of collection and

selection, we were also interested in how the Anglo-American canon was valued and

presented. For archival workers in countries such as Iceland and Israel, whether such

canons are granted authorization, and how they accord with local pop and rock

heritage is an important question. In the following sections, we deal with an

“internationalization” of archival practices, although with differing budgets,

ambitions, and understandings of pop and rock.

Assembling a comprehensive collection

As a nation with a population of 320,000, it is interesting to consider how Iceland

tackles the issue of building a complete collection of popular music in its national

library. The National and University Library of Iceland’s (NULI) policy is to obtain

every piece of music produced and released on Icelandic territory. As a librarian in

the Audio-Visual department noted: “We collect it all. We are not excluding

anything” (NULI worker, 2010); it acts as a reference for other archival institutions in

the country. Since this archive has to be comprehensive, others, such as the radio and

television archive of the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service (RUV) can rely on

the Library’s approach to gather potentially missing information in their own

collections.

For the National and University Library of Iceland the key to assembling a

comprehensive collection is a policy of inclusiveness in which there are no limitations

on the selection of material for the collection beyond the material being broadly

Icelandic. The cultural significance of the material is not measured prior to being

archived. Instead, it is its historicity, once archived, that will establish its significance

(or not). For example, “one third of the publications [in the audio-visual department]

are individual publications” with, as the Audio-Visual librarian explained, each

individual contacted in the effort to “try to get it all” (NULI worker, 2010). This is

time consuming work which requires a significant amount of research and

17

investigation. In addition to the work of musicians in Iceland, the Library also

references and archives Icelandic artists living abroad: “We try to collect that as well,

the foreign publications. And if we know of them we buy them from abroad [such as

on] Amazon” (NULI worker, 2010). The small population size is what makes this

kind of comprehensive collection practice possible, with the work amounting to

seeking out on average one release a day per year:

Per year we are getting from about... I think, 260 titles published in Iceland that

we have got, but then we are still collecting years back, because it’s often very

hard to get those private publications. It takes time (NULI worker, 2010).

This approach to the building of a collection reveals an institutional attitude in which

everything represents the national context and can be potentially significant.

For countries with much larger populations, obtaining all material related to a nation’s

musical output is much more difficult. The British Library Sound Archive (BLSA),

for example, also aims for a comprehensive collection. Unlike the book collection in

the British Library in which publishers have a legal obligation to deposit a copy,

sound recordings are deposited “on a voluntary basis. We can’t make people give us

their material which is why it’s such a big job” (BLSA worker, 2011). As the popular

music archivist at the British Library Sound Archive observed, the collection relies

… on [record] companies for some of the stuff and generally it works quite

well. I mean four or five times a week I get parcels delivered here containing,

well, [holds up a CD] this sort of thing, commercial releases and it tends to be

from the majors and the major distributors, so it's independent labels that take a

lot of work. There are various means by which we try and keep up with them …

occasionally, people say, no we don't want to be, we're of the now, we're not

interested in history and stuff like that. And we say, okay, fair enough because

we can't force but if it is something particularly interesting I'll just go and buy it

(BLSA worker, 2011).

Of course, because more music is released in the UK than it is in Iceland, the

comprehensive approach therefore requires much more effort for the British Library

18

Sound Archive worker than his counterpart in Iceland. The main issue of the

comprehensive approach for places like the British Library Sound Archive (and also

the NFSA) is that the amount of new releases is likely to supersede the amount of

(independent) releases tracked down and obtained for the collection. And because the

archive doesn’t receive materials automatically due to record companies being legally

obliged to make a deposit it therefore involves a lot of research to keep track of what

might need to be acquired:

We won’t get it automatically so I make sure I get it [through] finding out about

new things, reading stuff … magazines like Q, Mojo, Music Week, the trade

magazine, so just reading about music (BLSA worker, 2011).

Budgets and Shifting Priorities

Another issue related to building and maintaining a comprehensive collection is one

of labour. As a senior employee in the National Sound Archive at the National

Library of Israel (NLI) put it, “the issue is manpower” (NLI worker, 2011). The

amount of material coming into the archive outstrips the number of staff available to

catalogue it. There is then a struggle between the amount of material that the archive

owns and receives, with its view to having a comprehensive collection, and the

resources (labour, time, money) the archive has to catalogue artefacts. In terms of

labour, “cataloguing is very expensive” (NLI worker, 2011).

Regardless of the institution, the costs of archiving popular music must be justified.

As an interviewee in a management position with the EMI Archive noted: “if you’re a

service department you always have to justify your existence or your expense,

particularly if you’re getting new management in or whatever, I think that’s the same

across the board” (EMI worker, 2011). These budgetary justifications relate to more

than just staffing:

So there’s size and then there’s the building itself. That requires quite a lot of

maintenance just because of the specialist systems. So there’s air conditioning,

fire suppression systems, fire alarms, security, racking, we have roller racking,

which struggles a bit under the weight of some of the items. So we’ve got a

constant repair system there and then all the other things that you would have in

19

archives, like is your roof watertight … It’s a very large facility … so it’s a

constant question of prioritization (EMI worker, 2011).

The question of prioritization of budgets is linked to the centrality of preservation and

conservation. An archivist from the BBC Archive contends that “Preservation is

probably number one, which is really not only a technology thing, but a money thing

as well” (BBC worker, 2011). Priorities are often clearly marked out. As an archivist

from the Georgia State University Library Special Collections Department (GSUL)

put it during a discussion of cataloguing and digitisation:

I would probably put those in as a priority, and of course, reel-to-reels, because

[deterioration] happens over time, where you have to bake the reels, to be able

to transfer them. The 78s and LPs, we’re cataloguing them now, and re-housing

them in to proper sleeves. But they’ll last properly, and I’m keeping them, if

they’re shelved properly to where they aren’t going to warp, or leaning over,

and things like that, little stuff like that, and they’ll last a long time. Also with

those, since everything in that is still under copyright, if I did digitize it, I

couldn’t do anything outside of these four walls. I couldn’t put it up on-line.

They kind of keep getting put back, because we can’t really do anything with it,

or make it accessible to everyone. It’s hard to justify (GSUL worker, 2011).

The financial bottom lines that must be met by music archives housed in larger

institutions shape what gets collected and the ways in which this material is managed,

processed, and preserved. Shifting institutional priorities means funding is often in

flux and, as the interviewee from Israel’s National Sound Archive put it “This is what

is very difficult for a music archive to be held in a National Library” (NLI worker,

2011).

Role of the Archive

The above difficulties aside, many archivists interviewed for the research emphasized

the important role of their archival collections in the establishment, delineation or

preservation of (the idea of) a national identity. The obsession with the “formally

national and the nationally formal” observed in the NFSA part of this article, is also

present in the internationally located archivists’ accounts. The “national” role of the

20

archive is put into question by processes of globalization that erase some of the

boundaries between cultural specificities. In fact, popular culture/knowledge becomes

increasingly included within the formal context of statehood.

For example in the UK context, an archivist from the BBC Archive explored the link

between the existence of the archive and the idea of a national identity:

This stuff is important … It’s cultural history, it’s kind of the story of how the

BBC has been the soundtrack to everyone’s lives, most people’s lives in this

country, depending on whatever they like to listen to. Whether it’s classical

music, or pop, or speech, or whatever, then the BBC is there. So as part of sort

of fabric of the nation and all that kind of stuff, it’s really important (BBC

worker, 2011).

In this account the archive represents national identity due to a historical presence of

the BBC in peoples’ lives in ways that aren’t bound by the BBC’s production

locations. Through its long history as the “nation’s broadcaster” the BBC has come to

mediate senses of place and identity, to the point where it becomes part of the “fabric”

of the country. Similarly, the artefacts preserved in its archive subsequently become

“carriers” of this national identity. Although it isn’t the “national archive”, as this

archivist says, “we’ve been around for a long time. We are the nation’s broadcaster.

So we have a national role” (BBC worker, 2011). Indeed, for this interviewee, it is

this aspect of the archive that makes his a “worthwhile job” (BBC worker, 2011).

In the case of the British Library Sound Archive, the delineation, promotion,

establishment, or preservation of a national identity is challenged by a somewhat

ambivalent archival mission in which there is a double movement towards what has

been commercialized, and therefore consumed/listened to in Great Britain, but also

towards building “the world’s knowledge.” As the popular music archivist explained:

… the brief is a collection of the sound recordings commercially issued in the

UK and we augment it with non-commercial material... We have a world and

traditional music department, because we have to; it’s part of the National

Library reflecting culture from around the UK and in fact our … strap line is

21

[“The world’s knowledge”]… [Some may] find [that] rather presumptuous and

possibly arrogant (BLSA worker, 2011).

The role of this archive becomes twofold; representing national identity and, perhaps

to a lesser extent despite the “strap line,” representing a global culture. Though it

might seem “possibly arrogant,” the brief to also be a deposit of the “world’s

knowledge” is more likely a reflection of the complexities of British identities post-

Empire.

The experience of creating, delineating, and preserving a national identity is even

more complex in the Israeli experience in which the archive and its first artefacts

existed prior to the establishment of the nation state. An interviewee from the

National Sound Archive and Library of Israel contends:

This archive is part of the National Library … which was a National Library

before the State of Israel. It was established 120 years ago. We celebrate this

summer, next summer, 120-year birthday. It was established by the Zionist

Congress as the National Library of the People of the Book, before the State of

Israel … (NLI worker, 2011).

As such, there was, as this interviewee stressed, “culture and thinking of culture

before there was a state” (NLI worker, 2011). The collection began not in delineating

a “national” identity but rather a “Zionist” or “Jewish” identity. Today this creates a

tension in regards to the archive’s role in promoting an Israeli national identity, as

opposed to a broader “Jewish” or “Zionist” identity. This is played out in decisions

about what to include in the collection and what not to include. Such choices are

made harder due to, firstly, a lack of information about what needs to be collected

(“Also we don’t know if [items are] missing [from our catalogue], there’s no

discography of Israel popular music” – NLI worker, 2011), and secondly, how one

might actually define “Israeli popular music.” Therefore the primary endeavour of the

archive is to gather everything that might be considered Israeli but this is complicated

by understandings of how what might be a cohesive Israeli identity intersects with

Jewish or Zionist identities. For example, the interviewee from the sound archive

expressed a desire to include in the collection a greater array of music:

22

We have Beatles notes, the musical notes we have. We have research, articles,

encyclopedias on popular music, but not the music itself. It’s not really part of

our definition, mandate, but if the library would have some money I would

say... that also Beethoven belongs here and also Mozart and also the Beatles and

also Bob Dylan. For me it’s the same general culture. (NLI worker, 2011)

These kinds of debates over what constitutes the “national” in the collections deemed

to be of national significance are important because of the extent to which archives

“wield power over the shape and direction of historical scholarship, collective

memory, and national identity, over how we know ourselves as individuals, groups,

and societies” (Schwartz and Cook 2). As Assmann so clearly states, “the archive is

not just a place in which documents from the past are preserved; it is also a place

where the past is constructed and produced” (“Cultural memory” 13). Unpacking the

processes and practices of acquisition in popular music archives demonstrates the

challenges for preserving music’s material culture beyond already established canons.

Conclusions

In this article we have documented the extent to which formal collection bodies

document and store popular music material for particular national communities. The

financial and labour resources involved reveal that debates about the worth of popular

culture have been erased in favour of more pragmatic concerns. Some older debates

are not so easily resolved: the fierce protection of existing copyright laws by the

recording companies extends to relationships with institutions such as the NFSA,

limiting the public nature of material and its more imaginative uses for discussion.

It is also clear that matters of collection policy, state budget allocations, and

understandings of national identity are intimately linked. The eternal problem of

selection is becoming acute as national and regional governments ask institutions to

sharpen their profiles and relevance. This has produced a pragmatic response from

staff at the larger archives discussed here in questioning their ability to function as

comprehensive repositories of the nation. A more effective strategy might include

making greater use of the personal memories, enthusiasm, and deep knowledge of its

curators and specialist music collection staff. While the challenges presented by

23

digital “big data” encompassing commercial and amateur music-media are obvious,

questions of nation-building are also relevant as the BBC and the ABC (broadcasters

in Britain and Australia respectively) increasingly look to their own music archives to

shape national understandings.

The research indicates how differently popular music archiving (both practice and

policy) relates to questions of “national identity” in different national contexts. In the

cases of Israel and Australia, archivists and curators sometimes reveal underlying

concern or even anxiety: cultural terms of reference are frequently uncertain, or

subject to political contestation, and these ambiguities might be expressed or felt as

the need to scrupulously justify budgets (as well as acquisition and exhibition

choices). In the case of Australian popular music archiving, a dominant stance of

“celebratory optimism” can be detected, and we might wonder to what extent this is

the obverse of that anxiety. British popular music archive workers on the other hand

seem much less obliged to perform the “heavy lifting” of shaping, defining, and

affirming larger matters of national identity.7 Nor do they apparently feel any

particular need to defend the importance of national popular music-related archiving

in principle.

Other questions about defining national identity through popular music remain. In

Australian contexts, the predominance of white pop and rock—the second-hand

borrowing of U.S. and British origins—requires further complication through an

awareness of the role of indigenous and non-Anglophone migrant performers and

scenes. In Israeli contexts, even the basic understanding of a national pop repertoire

cannot be taken for granted. In British contexts, the influence of local jazz, rock and

roll, and pop on histories elsewhere must also inform the interplay of the local and the

global. Even in Iceland, a country where the small population makes the desire for a

comprehensive collection more achievable, questions remain about how archival

material is used in ways that (re)produce canons and the implications of that on

understandings of Icelandic identity8. While practices across our national case studies

are similar, further study is required as to how political economy contexts – including

broader national attitudes about the role of such histories within increasingly neo-

liberal governance – will influence the futures of the popular music archive.

24

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the archivists and curators interviewed from the

several institutions involved in this Australian Research Council project. Thanks also

to Raphael Nowak for research assistance.

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under Grant

DP1092910, Popular music and cultural memory: Localised popular music histories

and their significance for national music industries (2010-2012).

Endnotes 1 We are drawing here on Stratton’s (244) distinctions in popular music between

“nationalistic” modes as celebrations of a nation; and “nation-building” as exercises in the

“claim to a lived, shared culture”. 2 Led by Professor Andy Bennett (Griffith University, Australia), the project team also

included Associate Professor Shane Homan (Monash University, Australia), Associate

Professor Sarah Baker (Griffith University, Australia), Dr Peter Doyle (Macquarie University,

Australia), Dr Alison Huber (Griffith University, Australia), Professor Timothy Dowd

(Emory University, USA), Professor Susanne Janssen (Erasmus University, The

Netherlands), Professor Sara Cohen (University of Liverpool), Professor Motti Regev (Open

University, Israel) and Dr Ian Rogers (Griffith University, Australia). Additional funding for

fieldwork in Austria and Iceland was provided by an Australian Academy of the Humanities

ISL-HCA International Research Fellowship (2nd Round, 2010) awarded to Sarah Baker. 3 15 NFSA staff members were interviewed who worked with the music collection. We were

particularly struck during these interviews by the enthusiasm for their jobs based upon often

intensive involvement with popular music: one staffer wrote questions for a TV music quiz

program; one was a folk music radio broadcaster; another played in rock cover bands; and the

person responsible for the indigenous collection was a former member of a famous

Aboriginal band. 4 NFSA functions are broadly governed by statute, the National Film and Sound Archive Act

2008 (NFSA Act). The NFSA (as it states of itself) [has] “a unique mandate to build a

collection of Australian and international audiovisual works, to preserve these works and to

make them accessible. Our aim is to develop and maintain a collection of audiovisual and

related materials that have enduring cultural significance. We acquire material that represents:

a cultural and historical record; a record of Australian creative and technical achievement in

the audiovisual context; a reflection of the role, nature and status of audiovisual media in

society. Our curators carefully consider which works should be acquired for the audiovisual

collection and present acquisition progress reports to the NFSA Collection Committee. These

works are then recommended to the NFSA Board for approval” (“Acquisition policy” 9-10).

The policy refers to a “Statement of Significance”, which may, it says, be used to substantiate

specific acquisitions in cases where “particularly unusual or additional factors have

influenced a decision to acquire material.” (NFSA, “Acquisition policy” 10) The primary

criteria cited include historical, aesthetic, scientific/research/technical, cultural/spiritual and

provenance categories. “Comparative criteria” include “representativeness”, “rarity”,

25

“condition/completeness/intactness/integrity” and “interpretive potential” (NFSA,

“Acquisition policy” 53). 5 A good recent example of this strategy is the wide media attention that the NFSA received

upon finding the original recording of the “Aeroplane Jelly” jingle from 1938, which

provided curators with the opportunity to further explain the contexts of its composition and

production (http://aso.gov.au/titles/ads/aeroplane-jelly-song/notes/). The jingle is nationally

famous and well known to Australian radio and television audiences either side of World War

Two. 6 The NFSA headquarters in Australia’s national capital city, Canberra, is housed in an

imposing between-the-wars deco building (a one time school of anatomy) located on the

campus of Australian National University. Australia’s media production and publishing

organizations however are heavily centered in the cities of Sydney and Melbourne, which also

represent the heaviest concentrations of population (and thus the heaviest concentrations of

potential users, both professional and amateur, of the NFSA collections, and largest potential

audiences for on site exhibitions). 7 This holds true in a slightly different way for the BBC Archive: here the problematic

processes of selection (and exclusion) are a priori, having in a sense already taken place (in

earlier selection of broadcast playlists etc). Thus the archivist’s job is more one of capture and

preservation than cultural and national agenda setting and canon formation. 8 This can be observed, for example, in Icelandic music documentaries such as Screaming Masterpiece

(2005) and Rokk I Reykjavik (1982).

26

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