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 their 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 our approach to establishing a foundation for developing a new kind of digital archive for musicology that is both valuable for researchers, fulfils the needs of the societies and their communities, and sheds light on community music-making on a national and, ultimately, international scale. By carrying out a series of preliminary scoping exercises, including informal interviews and archival-collection assessments, we can compare current archiving and preservation activities across the societies. These conversations bring emerging themes, issues and challenges into focus, raising pertinent questions that will inform our development of transformative tools and techniques for community digitisation projects.