The tl;dr answer: what we feel does based on our biases as music journalists who were involved in the creation of a large archival project funded by a questionable brand and our ongoing efforts to figure out what it all meant.
The long answer is that while this project began as a private effort between two journalists to list music-related archives and collections in order to figure out what we might do next, one of us went on to study Digital Humanities and fell into the heady world of archival sciences while the other started a newsletter about the music journalism business. As a result, what counts as an archive or historical resource has evolved in the four years since that first private list because we’ve evolved and are continuing to try and figure out what it means to have dedicated so much of our lives to music history.
In addition, there’s also a desire to use this project to push against the constricting boundaries of what a music-related historical resource might be understood as, which tends towards the European-centric concepts of libraries, archives, and museums. Rather than follow this narrow path, the catalogue tries to embrace the wonderful diversity of how music history is being kept alive today — be it social media, personal websites, or more concerted efforts — and of how people continue to engage with it in the present. History in that sense doesn’t have to equate with something that happened long ago, especially as when it comes to music so much that is happening today is often gone tomorrow yet still deserves to be remembered now.
As a result some of what we catalogue is 100% what someone well versed in the library and archival sciences would consider ‘correct’, like digitized archival holdings from a university complete with all its metadata and provenance information, while some of it is 100% what a working music journalist would consider ‘useful’, like an Internet Archive dump of scans from a 90s magazine not available anywhere else. And if we take these two things as the sort of ends of a spectrum we find that in between there are lots of wonderful ways that people have gone about and keep going about preserving the music history that matters to them online — ways that can help archivists, journalists, and fans expand their understanding of preservation — be it an Instagram account that collects visual memories from people involved in a specific music scene at a specific point in time or a collection of documents about a certain topic arranged by a community of its own accord and for its own purposes or a data-driven project that shows how people consume music on streaming platforms.
When this project began as a Google Doc we decided to use genre categories as a way to organize content. This soon evolved past just genres and into related concepts like the music industry or music publications or things that are related to a specific place (which quickly became the largest category). These categories were also used for a Table of Contents, which was one way to make navigation of a large Google Doc easier and somewhat similar to what you’d expect in a traditional document format. When we migrated to this website we decided to keep the categories regardless of their imperfections as an easy way to shortcut to a general area of interest.
These categories, much like the genres many of them represent, are imperfect and intended only as a guide. Many of the resources catalogued here focus on more than one genre or subject so the approach has been to classify them under the category that is potentially most relevant, e.g. their primary subject, and to add secondary subject(s) to the descriptions whenever possible. This doesn’t always work and as this cataloguing effort has been ongoing for a few years now there are some discrepancies.
There is only really one baseline criteria for a resource to be included: it should be about music in some form and it should make information available to the user online in some form(s). The project began as a private spreadsheet listing music archives and collections, mostly the traditional type you might find in institutions like universities, and grew from there. As it was decided to make this public we began to expand our vision beyond the traditional and towards the things that we, as music journalists and fans, take for granted as being repositories of historical information: magazine archives, social media pages, community projects etc…
The only other thing that dictates what might go in is the level of online accessibility, meaning that we tend not to include resources that require someone to visit in person in order to access any information. A few of these are in there, mainly because they feel highly relevant and inescapable (Bob Dylan, Moog Foundation), but by and large if a resource doesn’t make anything available online we tend not to include it. We do however include physical archives that make their catalogue or finding aids available online, as this provides potentially useful and accessible information.
Great 🙌🏻 This catalog is very much built on knowledge sharing, with people sending us tips and recommendations privately and publicly. You can send us resources for inclusion by emailing Laurent (using his first name combined with the name of the first domain he registered, spinscience dot org dot uk) or finding him social platforms (currently Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn).