A national electronic database of special music collections in South Africa

[摘要] In the absence of a state-sponsored South African archive that focuses on collecting,ordering, cataloguing and preserving special music collections for research, theDocumentation Centre for Music (DOMUS) was established in 2005 as a researchproject at the University of Stellenbosch. Music research in South Africa is oftenimpeded by inaccessibility of materials, staff shortages at archives and libraries,financial constraints and time-consuming ordering and cataloguing processes.Additionally there is, locally, restricted knowledge of the existence, location andstatus of relevant primary sources. Accessibility clearly depends on knowing of theexistence of materials, as well as the extent to which collections have been orderedand catalogued.An overview of repositories such as the Nasionale Afrikaanse Letterkundige Museumand Navorsingsentrum (NALN), the now defunct National Documentation Centre forMusic and the International Library of African Music (ILAM) paints a troublingpicture of archival neglect and disintegration. Apart from ILAM, which has a veryspecific collecting and research focus, this trend was one that ostensibly started in the1980s and is still continuing. It could be ascribed to a lack of planning and forwardthinking under the previous political dispensation, aggravated by policies oftransformation and restructuring in the current one.Existing sources supporting research on primary materials are dated and notdiscipline-specific. Thus this study aims to address issues of inaccessibility of primarymusic materials by creating a comprehensive and ongoing national electronic databaseof special music collections in South Africa. It is hoped that this will help to alertresearchers to the existence and status of special music collections housed at variouslevels of South African academic and civil society.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University