Australian Jazz Archive Networking

Elsewhere on this new website there is a general overview of the Australian Jazz Archive, which includes reference to the Australian Jazz Archive National Council (AJANC). This Council collaborates with ScreenSound Australia in developing the AJA, and in doing so it represents the national jazz community, funnelling proposals to SSA from the local communities in general and local archival bodies in particular. Once each year the regional delegates assemble in Canberra at the premises of SSA to conduct a day long Forum, in consultation also with representatives of SSA to review progress.

Anyone wishing to participate or simply make enquiries about jazz archiving both in their own region and at the AJA, should contact the local representative. Currently those contacts are:

Australian Capital Territory

John Sharpe
5 Darke Street
Torrens
ACT 2607

New South Wales

Mike Sutcliffe
15 Lowanna Avenue
Baulkham Hills
NSW 2153

Queensland

Laurel Dingle
Queensland University
Brisbane
l.dingle@library@uq.edu.au

South Australia

Don Hopgood
19 Roy Avenue
Morphett Vale,
SA 5162
hopgood@arcom.com.au

Tasmania

Veronica Lyons
3 Tasma Street
Launceston
Tasmania 7250
d_vlyons@intas.net.au

Victoria

John Kennedy
PO Box 6007
Wantirna Mall
Melbourne 3152

Western Australia

Garry Lee
JAZZWA,
PO Box 295
North Beach
WA 6920

A number of these contacts are associated with formally constituted local archival bodies:

New South Wales Jazz Archive
bemfrogcasey@bigpond.com.au
South Australian Jazz Archive
dlanod@aandr.com.au
Victorian Jazz Archive Inc
vjazarch@vicnet.net.au http://home.vicnet.net.au/ ~vjazarch/

A few hours’ window-shopping through the site reminds the cyber-flaneur just how abundantly ScreenSound is resourced to store, restore, preserve and catalogue materials in a way that makes them publicly available. As a framework for a jazz archive the facility is incomparable, the envy of other jazz archives overseas. Keying in the website address presents you with a home page with the following options:six options: ‘About us’, ‘What’s On’, ‘Services’, ‘Preservation’, ‘Collection’, ‘Education’, ‘Shop’. Imagine you wish to make a focussed jazz search. Perhaps you want to know about a certain musician, or are thinking of doing some interviewing but want to avoid pointless duplication. Apart from ScreenSound’s holdings of Australian jazz recordings, which are catalogued, there is also a register of recorded interviews. Click on ‘Collection’ and the screen will bring up several options on the left of the screen, including ‘Australian Jazz Archive’. A click brings you to an introduction to the Australian Jazz Archives, and a choice of pathways, all of which are self-explanatory. Working your way through a website or a CD-ROM can be rather confusing at first, but it is actually no different from learning how to use a reference book, with its main text, footnotes, bibliography, and of course its introduction and preface. I know some tend to skip these introductory comments, wanting to get to ‘the story’ – and as a consequence they derive only the most superficial benefits, often also forming irritated misconceptions about what the book provides. We have to play with a reference book a little before we know how to drive it effectively. Same with a website. All of which is to say: browse through the options for a while, and it will become clear how to operate this ‘reference text’, including through a search by name, if you are trying to find out about, say holdings of interviews.

It doesn’t take long to bring up desired information. Let us take for example Merv Acheson: key in his name and you are asked to choose between Merv Acheson and Mervyn Fletcher Acheson. A check of both produces the same listing of record and film holdings involving Merv – the two names simply provide a double check. Or you may conduct the same search among the whole collection, which will also list items of which the archive holds only a preservation copy at this stage. If you want to inspect these, there is an extra charge to make an access copy – again, standard practice in public archives. These options (‘Access’ and ‘Complete Collection’ searches) can also be conducted as ‘Advanced Search’, by which you can key in a range of other search permutations such as date, place of origin, subject, title and so on.

The point of the foregoing is to flag the facility as a research tool and to provide a beginner’s guide to its use. With a very small amount of practice, it provides easy access to a range of Australian jazz materials in a way that was unimaginable a decade ago. Much of the exhausting and expensive travel which I undertook for the Oxford Companion to Australian Jazz would now be completely unnecessary because of the AJA. The Archive is not just a mute repository, it is a public utility. I have merely scanned its holdings, but that is sufficient to discover that the point has been reached at which the AJA is now an essential facility for anyone setting up a research project on Australian jazz, and an invaluable source for recording or media projects.

Bruce Johnson
Chair, Australian Jazz Archive National Council.

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Hash Varsani is the owner of The Jazz Directory, a network of sites related to jazz, travel and everything else he loves. He also runs a selection of jazz related sites including Jazz Club Jury, a jazz club and festival review site. Check out his Google+ Profile, to see what else he's up to...probably setting up another website from one of his many passions.

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