This website began as a public Google Doc in 2021 within the Music Journalism Insider newsletter project, which was run by Todd L. Burns and closed in December 2023. That Google Doc in turn began as a private spreadsheet between Todd and myself, started sometime in 2019 as we were both nearing the end of our employment for the creative agency behind the Red Bull Music Academy. RBMA had been a part of both our lives for close to a decade and the archive and historical information it had accumulated in that time meant a lot to us, as it did to many others around the world. In light of the somewhat somber feelings around the end of the project we set about figuring out what could be next. And that started with looking at the world of music archives.

Eventually Todd began the newsletter and I went back to school, to do a masters in Digital Humanities. From there we continued to talk about what music archives and histories could be which eventually led to the idea of taking this early spreadsheet, expanding it, and sharing it with others. In the summer of 2021, Todd, Miranda Reinert, and myself created the first version of the Google Doc, which was published a few months later. Following this, Todd and I kept a running staging doc with new things we found or were tipped to and I updated the document as and when - from around 130 resources when we started to 240 today (December 2023, so about two years later). In that time about 10 to 15 resources have disappeared.

I actually ended up using the work we’d done on this public document for my thesis, which looked at ways of using machine learning to facilitate finding new music archive resources via social media. In that process I spent some time looking at the practice and tradition of cataloguing, and the odd niche of catalogues about catalogues — which is what this project of ours had turned into. Once I was done with school I felt like it would be right to turn the document into an actual online catalogue, if only to fulfil the meta-ness of it all. And also because a Google Doc can be an absolute pain to navigate, though it has its own charms.

So here we are, with a website that catalogues music history-related catalogues, collections, archives, websites, social media pages and other sorts of wonderful preservation efforts. I hope you might find something useful, interesting, and inspiring in there just as I have many times over.

This website will be updated on an irregular schedule, and the Google Doc remains available though that will no longer be updated as of December 2023 (as of launch the website includes more resources and metadata than the doc).

This website was built using the Wax workflow from Minicomp, intended to create minimal online exhibitions (so yeah it’s a catalogue about catalogues that uses a visual exhibition digital framework, because why not), and with inspiration from the Music DH 2021 project (from which some resources have been included in our catalogue) as well as the Audubon exhibit at the Lily Library.

All of the content and data is available under a CC-BY 4.0 license. The spreadsheet that powers the whole thing can be viewed and downloaded below.

Laurent Fintoni, December 2023