Preserve Midwest Rave Culture: Support the Archive

A new initiative in preservation and collection care of audio/visual and print ephemera related to Rave culture across the Midwest

Those cassettes won’t outlive us. Those tapes and CD’s aren’t damage resistant. Video recordings should see the light of day. Photos tell their own stories. Flyers are fragile. Our culture marks the advent of born-digital art and media. Let’s give some proper care to subcultural artifacts - our prized memories. Everyone deserves a long-term preservation plan.

Organizing an archive is not without cost. This community-centric project is calling on community-centric people to advocate, contribute, and raise funds as we get started.

I (Aria) am working from the Online Computer Library Center Research tool, “Total cost of Stewardship: Responsible Collection Building in Archives and Special Collections”

to set a fundraising goal.

$5,500

Total Cost of Stewardship: Physical and Digital Preservation Plan

Tasks and Responsibilities

1) Collection

2) Processing, Digitization, Reformatting, Preservation,

Physical/Digital Storage

3) User Accessible Database

4) Long-term Collection Care

Expenses

Labor: Technical skill and execution of digital media conversion and reformatting. Skill and execution of processing digital, born-digital, and physical material into a digital data base. Skill and execution of processing, preserving, and storing physical materials.

Supplies, Equipment, Administration: Acid Free storage containers, sleeves and boxes, access to computers/scanners, access to digital media converters, hard drives and USBs for participants' collections and archive. USPS Shipping and Handling.

Physical Storage: Secure, weather and condition proof, library standard physical storage

Digital Storage: Software, Cloud storage, hard drives and USBs for participants' collections and archive, Internet Archive Repository

Bit by bit we can build this. Thank you for being curious, for sharing, for making a donation, for following along.