Democratising Digitisation : Making History with Community Music Societies in Digitally Enabled Collaborations

In post-COVID times we are focusing quite rightly on the plight of our major cultural institutions; but just as important are the local societies that enrich our community life, including amateur music societies, devastated by stringent social-distancing requirements and the health and safety implications of live performance in small spaces. We propose a vision of digitally enabled collaboration that may help these societies rebuild their sense of community and purpose, by working together with academics, archives, and a major US arts centre to reconnect with their past and enrich understanding of their own histories and traditions within a broader national context

(Re)capturing the Emotional Geography of Lost Music Venues : A Case Study of the Willow Community Digital Archive

The loss of many high-street music venues in recent years has highlighted their connectedness to place and communities. Understanding the emotional geographies of these venues, as experienced by their patrons, is key to explaining the outcry that can accompany such closures. In these circumstances it can be challenging to try to (re)capture the intangible elements that defined a lost venue for its patrons and widen the scope for musicological enquiry. This paper sets out to address that challenge by exploring methods developed by the Willow Community Digital Archive to co-create a community archive in celebration of The Willow, a family-run restaurant-cum-nightclub that operated in York, UK, for over 40 years. Further, we detail how these methods informed the crafting of a general-purpose digital library system to form the archive. We also detail some initial experiments with ChatGPT, embedded into the archive, to investigate its potential to encourage visitors to engage with and inspire further contributions to the archive

Towards a Foundation for Collaborative Digital Archiving with Local Concert-Giving Organisations

The centenaries of former chapters of the British Music Society (BMS), established in 1918, have prompted the governing bodies to take stock of their histories and build on the cataloguing, documentation and preservation of their archival collections. The InterMusE project aims to support this shared ‘instinct to archive’ by capturing and, crucially, linking different forms of data regarding the musical events provided by three of these local concert-giving organisations, beginning with the digitisation of their collections and with a view to producing a dynamic, open-access digital archive. This paper outlines the project team’s approach to establishing a foundation for developing a new kind of digital library for musicology that is both valuable for researchers and fulfils the needs of the societies and their communities. The aim is to empower them to reflect on and celebrate their histories and identities using a range of methodologies in digitally enabled collaboration. By carrying out a series of preliminary scoping exercises, including informal interviews and archival-collection assessments, we are able to compare current archiving and preservation activities across the societies. These conversations bring emerging themes, issues and challenges into focus, raising pertinent questions that will, along with a review of related projects and good practice in co-production, inform our development of transformative tools and techniques for community digitisation projects

Enriching Cultural Heritage Communities : New Tools and Technologies

This paper explores ways in which scholarly skill and expertise might be embodied in tools and sustainable practices that enable communities to create and manage their own digital archives. We focus particularly on tools and practices related to the recording and annotation of digitised materials. The paper is based on co-production practice in two very different kinds of community. Although the communities are different we find that tools designed specifically for one are valuable for others, thus offering the promise of general tools to support commmunty-centred digitisation and potentially also traditional archival practice. (Invited extended and updated version of 'Tools & Technology to Support Rich Community Heritage' BCS conference paper.