Reframing ephemera: digitisation, community music-making, and archival value(s)

Live musical performances play a powerful role in defining human communities across the globe, yet such intangible temporal/spatial experiences tend to leave only faint traces on the historical record. The Internet of Musical Events: Digital Scholarship, Community, and the Archiving of Performance (InterMusE) project is working with local concert-giving institutions to digitise diverse source types relating to musical events and linking them together in the form of a dynamic digital archive, enabling them to “speak” to each other despite their apparently incompatible formats and geographical dispersal. Modelling new approaches to the open-access presentation of music-historical research based on digitally enabled collaboration, the project adopts an intensely collaborative and egalitarian approach to working alongside these musical communities to understand and preserve their heritage. This chapter explores community archives of musical ephemera as sites of co-produced, “post-custodial” collecting and preservation that can radically transform approaches to digitisation, community music-making, and archival value(s).