Australian Jazz Museum
Knox City Centre, VIC
Museums & Heritage
http://www.ajm.org.au/
About Australian Jazz Museum
We’re a proud group of dedicated volunteers who are maintaining the premier Australian Jazz Museum. Home of the largest Australian jazz collection. Proactively Collecting, Archiving & Disseminating Australian Jazz. Proactively Collecting, Archiving & Disseminating
Collecting
Our entire collection is made up of donations by generous benefactors. We do not have the resources to purchase items for our collection, so the donation of jazz materials is very important.
Donate Materials or contact our Collection Manager.
Archiving
The long-term safety of our recorded Australian jazz is of key concern to us, and time is of the essence. Many of the early recordings are on acetate discs, old reel-to-reel tapes or cassette tapes. These, along with photos, films, historical musical instruments, posters, programs and other ephemera, are subject to deterioration and accidental damage. In particular, with acetate disks, the coating can peel off its aluminium base.
Recordings on fragile media such as acetate or tape are transcribed into the computer in our sound room, annotated appropriately, entered into a database, and output as preservation and/or access copies on highest-quality CDs. These are stored in our vault in archival packaging, with the access copy being the sole copy available for study or other use. The original recording and/or preservation copy is stored, untouched, in the vault for posterity and also lodged with Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive. A similar process is used to protect and preserve oral histories, video recordings, photographs and posters.
Less-fragile items that are gifted or bequeathed to the Australian Jazz Museum are sorted, documented, carefully packaged,and catalogued.
We have transcribed important Australian jazz performances from older formats to over 1,500 CDs and catalogued in excess of 100,000 individual tracks, records and personnel details.
All the archiving is done to high professional standards, a quality recognised by awards for conservation and preservation from both Museums Australia and the National Bank of Australia nationwide conservation program