Typical Girls: Women in Punk/Post-Punk/Underground Music (Circa 1975-1980s)

[Sharon Cheslow <decomposition AT mindspring.com>]

Hi Dina,

From my experience working with academic media archives, I'm sure you 
can get support (and maybe funding) through your school.  Check with 
any of the following departments: music, musicology, ethnomusicology, 
art history, women's studies.  See what digital archives they already 
have and how they can help you.  They might be able to offer support 
through work study students who can help with scanning, digitizing, 
processing, web design, etc., and your school might be able to help 
you with server space/electronic finding aids.  But then you have to 
deal with whether the artifacts become part of the school archives or 
whether you maintain some sort of independent archive.

See if there are already partnerships or collaborative efforts 
between library/info science and any of those other departments. 
There are also probably specific groups at your school library that 
are dedicated to digital archives or oral history and can offer 
assistance.  Find a professor in your grad program or in another 
dept. at your school who can supervise you.

If you look at the history of the Dada Archive at Univ. of Iowa (very 
cool, btw! thanks for the link), it says:
"Under the direction of Professor Kuenzli and the curatorship of 
Timothy Shipe, the activities of the International Dada Archive have 
been made possible through generous financial support by various 
agencies of the University, The University of Iowa Foundation, the 
Jerome Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 
addition, the administration and staff of the University Libraries 
have given their full cooperation in countless ways; the project 
would have been inconceivable without this enthusiastic support."

You say you want to start small, which is a great idea.  You might 
want to start with a small website, with some artifacts and links. 
You'll need a way to organize, store, and catalog things.  You'll 
eventually want a way for people to do searches.  You'll need to deal 
with intellectual copyright issues.  I don't know how it works at 
your school, but I did an internship at the UCLA Ethnomusicology 
Archive and also worked with digital archives at Stanford Univ., and 
there was by necessity collaboration among various departments, IT 
services, and library services.  So you shouldn't need to start from 
scratch.

But if you decide to host your own archive, you'll need to ask one of 
the professors in your grad program how you can continue this project 
once you're out of school.  If you have any questions, feel free to 
call me.

Sharon

> Thanks Nicole, Lani, and Karan! All of your support is welcomed.
>
> Nicole, I think I could build off your fabulous WIP archive and make
> it multimedia with authentic artifacts. You've done such a great job
> already! And thanks for those links, they were very helpful.
>
> Maybe we need to pool our resources here. I'm betting that there are
> people on this listserv who have some rare artifacts we could put in
> the digital archive...
>
> So we should start with the Slits/Ari? Let me think about it some more...
>
> I encourage all listmembers to chime in on this conversation! :-)
>
> -Dina