How does music heritage get lost? Examining cultural heritage loss in community and authorised music archives

Abstract

While the mission of many community archives is often to exhaustively collect and preserve material of their topic area, it is inevitable that some heritage will not be recovered. Lost heritage impacts both public and academic communities where it results in incomplete histories, missing records and restricted access to precarious intangible and physical resources. Heritage will always get lost–but what processes lead to this? This paper outlines some of the ways in which heritage is lost on its journey through private possession, community archives, and institutionalised collections. Archives of intangible cultural heritage, such as music, face particular challenges in preserving the material past of an intangible heritage. This paper uses a case study to describe instances of potential and actual heritage loss found through a joint project between a community archive and an institutional repository working towards the preservation of local jazz heritage in Queensland, Australia.