Northeast Ohio Popular Music Archives Scanning Days and Program

FAIN: PY-234606-16

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, Inc. (Cleveland, OH 44114-1023)
Jennie Thomas (Project Director: June 2015 to April 2017)

Community digitization events and public programming organized by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio. The project would document musical heritage in and around Cleveland, which was the birthplace of significant musicians, notable radio stations, as well as a tour stop for many jazz, blues, and gospel musicians before the rise of rock and roll. The proposed events would simultaneously preserve documentation of local music history and bring them into the museum’s collection for online and on-site exhibitions through contributions to the Northeast Ohio Popular Music Archives. The proposed activities, including four digitization days and a one-day event with a panel discussion of local musical history, would draw from personal collections to provide a window on popular music in a major American city.

The proposed project invites the public to bring two-dimensional objects related to local music history to four scanning events where Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum Library and Archives staff will digitize the items, provide a digital copy to the owner, and accession digital copies of appropriate items into the Northeast Ohio Popular Music Archives (NEOPMA). NEOPMA ensures that the musical history of a community that is home to dozens of internationally-known artists in multiple genres and that is widely regarded as the home of rock and roll, is not lost in the international focus of Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Rock Hall will use the items collected on the scanning days in a public event that discusses Northeast Ohio’s musical history, provides information about preserving personal collections, and discusses what items are appropriate and needed for ongoing collecting for the NEOPMA.