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 the 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 the project team’s approach to establishing a foundation for developing a new kind of digital library for musicology that is both valuable for researchers and fulfils the needs of the societies and their communities. The aim is to empower them to reflect on and celebrate their histories and identities using a range of methodologies in digitally enabled collaboration. By carrying out a series of preliminary scoping exercises, including informal interviews and archival-collection assessments, we are able to compare current archiving and preservation activities across the societies. These conversations bring emerging themes, issues and challenges into focus, raising pertinent questions that will, along with a review of related projects and good practice in co-production, inform our development of transformative tools and techniques for community digitisation projects