The founders of a budding archive are looking for help documenting the rich and diverse history and culture of the central Island music scene.
A conversation between Jean Blackburn and Jack Tieleman about the ebb and flow of Nanaimo’s music history quickly evolved into the development of the Mid-Island Music Archive. The online portal aims to involve local music scenes from the Malahat to Bowser, out to the Island’s west coast, as well as the Gulf Islands.
As a librarian at Vancouver Island University, Blackburn, MIMA chairperson, said she thought a lot about local memory and how to further preserve it while digitizing and archiving demo tapes of various local artists.
“All these demo tapes from shows back in the ’80s and ’90s … How many of these are in attics and boxes in people’s homes?” she asked. “And these stories are in the minds and the memories of the people that have been there, that have participated. And they’re not collected anywhere. How many artifacts and memories are out there in the community?”
Blackburn and Tieleman, MIMA treasurer, decided to take advantage of wiki-technology for its collaborative nature, reasoning that a collective can build a storehouse of information better than any individual can on their own. Once information has been added to the archive, any other member of the society can then edit or build on the content by adding text, posters, pictures, videos, or linking to websites such as Bandcamp and YouTube. To help members see where their experiences or knowledge might be helpful, the archive currently holds several stub pages or shell articles waiting to be developed.
“Really it’s the community that needs to create the content at this point,” Blackburn said, adding that there are interesting stories out there waiting to be documented. “All of this amazing stuff has happened here. It’s absolutely wild … But they’re not written down anywhere … We’ve got so many different types of music scenes here as well – jazz societies, blues, opera.”
Last month, MIMA held its inaugural ‘edit-a-thon’ where members were invited to bring in different mobile devices to learn the basics of editing for the archive. Blackburn said they intend to host several more before the end of the year.
Futher information on MIMA can be found at www.midislandmusicarchive.ca.
READ MORE: All sales vinyl at Nanaimo Record Show
mandy.moraes@nanaimobulletin.com
Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter
