For this project for my Seminar in Special Collections class, I had to work with technology and special collections. I decided to create a special collection, and then create a blog to go with it. This page contains three parts: 1), the project proposal; 2), the progress report on the digital aspects of the project; and 3), the marketing plan for the digital project. The project? Billy's Fiddles.
Project Proposal
a) What Special Collection Will I Be Working With?
The
Musical Instruments of William S. Hamilton, Ph. D., specifically those used in
bluegrass, folk, and old-time music. Dr. Hamilton is a professor of Russian at
Wake Forest University. He is a musician in his spare time, mostly playing the
banjo. His collection of old-time instruments contains fiddles, mandolins,
banjos, a dobro, guitars, an autoharp, a viola, and a bass fiddle, while his
personal collection also contains a trumpet and a piano. Dr. Hamilton is a
luthier in his spare time, and has made fiddles and mandolins. He has some in
various states of construction. Dr. Hamilton also has several parrots, who
enjoy singing along.
b) What will the technological dimensions of the project be?
I would
use various technological platforms, including YouTube, Flickr, and
WordPress/Blogger to create a digital collection of the instruments owned by
Dr. Hamilton. I would hopefully have other platforms, such as social media
(FaceBook, Tumblr, or Twitter), as well, as people can find resources such as
this on any of those platforms. I would take video of Dr. Hamilton playing the
instruments, audio of Dr. Hamilton talking about the history of the instruments
(especially the ones he made himself), and pictures of the instruments. The
technological aspects would be the creation and editing of the audio/visual
components, plus the embedding of them into blog or social media posts.
Essentially, I would be creating a blog with posts/pages about each instrument
in the collection, much like Special Collections and Archives at Z. Smith
Reynolds Library does for rare books. There would, hopefully, be outside links
to people, places, or things mentioned by Dr. Hamilton during interviews with
him.
c) Who do I Envision Using the Created Resource?
The users
would be anyone interested in the history of musical instruments used in
bluegrass, folk or old-time music. Dr. Hamilton is very knowledgeable about the
subject, and what he knows would be of interest to someone interested in music,
be it a researcher, a student majoring in music or Appalachian studies, or
simply a hobbyist. People who are interested in this type of music, or even in
the instruments themselves would be able to hear Dr. Hamilton talk about them,
as well as hear them played. The use of multiple technology platforms would
open up the potential users, as only using ContentDM or Omeka could limit the
user base. Many people read blogs, watch YouTube videos, and use Flickr for
photos. Still more people use social media. A Tumblr post with embedded audio,
video, and photos would gain users from people who would otherwise not find the
resource. Hobbyists would enjoy learning about the history and listening to the
recordings.
One of
the reasons this collection is important is the oral history side of
instruments. The best are still hand-made by luthiers, and most instruments
(handmade or not) have a story attached to them, such as a friend who owns a
guitar once played by John Stewart of the Kingston Trio, or a fiddle made out
of wood bought by a beloved relative who died much too young.
Annotated Bibliography
Special
Collections - the Louis Round Wilson Library. Southern Folklife Collection. Retrieved
from: http://library.unc.edu/wilson/sfc/.
One of
foremost collections of American folk music and culture, the Southern Folklife
Collection (SFC) is an archive of materials about the emergence southern folk
music, especially of bluegrass and old-time. This shows just how important
collecting and cataloging this sort of material is, as people are very
interested in learning about it. You can take classes southern history and
culture at UNC Chapel Hill and major in Appalachian studies at Appalachian
State.
Doster,
Meredith. (2008 December 04). Appalachian Musical Instruments and Their Makers.
Special Collections at Belk Library. Retrieved from: http://collections.library.appstate.
edu/research-aids/appalachian-musical-instruments-and-their-makers.
Very much
a LibGuide in style, this resource has places to start looking. It has Library
of Congress Subject Headings, (one can search within the Western North Carolina
Library Network [WNCLN] by subject headings and then see all materials with
that subject heading), call numbers to browse (one can search by call numbers
in the WNCLN and see all materials near that call number, much like browsing
the physical stacks), and other references to check. This includes books,
journals, and audio/visual components. While it is in dire need of being
updated, this resource is a good starting place, and shows the importance of a
collection such as Dr. Hamilton’s.
Wood,
Dave. (2007 November 29). Oral Tradition in Appalachian Old-Time Instrumental
Music.
Special Collection at Belk Library. Retrieved from:
http://collections.library. appstate.edu/research-aids/oral-tradition-appalachian-old-time-instrumental-music.
Also a
LibGuide in style, this resource is about old-time, a specific subset of
Appalachian Folk Music. It is characterized by, amongst other things, no lyrics.
It differs from bluegrass by the type of instruments and the songs being
played. This is a very good overview, with subject headings, call numbers,
books, and journals. While it does need to be updated, this is a very good
starting place, as it shows where a collection like Dr. Hamilton’s may sit in
history.
Special Collections - Belk Library and Information Commons. Music in the Appalachian Collection. Retrieved from: http://www.collections.library.appstate.edu/ appalachian/music.
The W. L.
Eury Appalachian Collection is a repository of materials with a focus on the
history of Appalachia. It contains a lot of everything, but one of its
strengths is its music. This resource, styled like a LibGuide, is a very good
starting, as it lets you link out to other parts of the Appalachia Collection
at Appalachian, and shows the importance of a collection such as that of Dr.
Hamilton.
Digital
Library of Appalachia. Retrieved from http://dla.acaweb.org/.
This
resource allows online access to the history of Appalachia, by way of various
universities in the region (oddly enough, not Appalachian, despite the emphasis
on Appalachian studies at Appalachian). There are many areas where one can
search. Like the other sources, this shows how important a collection like Dr.
Hamilton’s is.
Ritchie, F. K., and Orr, D. M. (2014). Wayfaring Strangers: the Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia. Chapel Hill, NC : The University of North Carolina Press.
This book shows the
history of the people who settled Appalachia – the Scots who first settled
Ulster before moving on. Artists, instruments, and places are profiled, showing
how the music started, and how the music has evolved. The writers are host of NPR’s
The Thistle and Shamrock (Ritchie),
and the president emeritus of Warren
Wilson College and founder of the Swannanoa Gathering (Orr).
Irwin, J.
R. and the Museum of Appalachia. (1979). Musical Instruments of the Southern
Appalachian Mountains: a History of the Author’s Collection Housed in the
Museum of Appalachia, Norris, Tennessee. Norris,
TN : Museum of Appalachia Press.
I have
requested this book through ILLiad, but have yet to hear back from anyone to
know if it is even on its way. I think that it will be a good look at the
history of Appalachian music and the musical instruments that play it.
Digital Project: Billy’s Fiddles
My project is a collection of blog posts, YouTube videos,
and Flicker galleries about instruments owned by my friend, Billy Hamilton,
specifically those instruments used in old-time and bluegrass music. Each
instrument gets its own blog post, and the blog posts have images embedded from
Flickr and videos embedded from YouTube. The images are photographs which I
took of the instruments in question, from wide-angle full-body shots to very
tight, close-in detail shots. The detail photographs focus on the abalone inlay
on a guitar, or the scars a banjo received falling out of an airplane.
One of the first things I did was to email Billy and see if
he was interested in the project. The next thing I did was set up a time with
him to go and interview him about his instruments. I also created a WordPress
blog, a Flickr account (and the requisite Yahoo email account), a Google
account (email and YouTube), as well as a Facebook page, all with the handle
“billysfiddles” This would allow for the branding of a special collection,
especially over social media, where consistency in the handles is very
important. Were I doing this professionally for a special collection, I would
also create Twitter and Tumblr accounts, so I could reach even more people.
My project started with a trip to Billy’s house, where I got
video of him talking about and playing his Martin D-28 Dreadnought guitar.
Given that I didn’t know much about how I was going to do what I wanted to for
this project, I let him talk for a long time. Not everything was about the
guitar, even. From that video, I created a very long YouTube video of him
talking about and playing his guitar. I also recorded some audio only of him
telling a few stories, and I created videos, using the audio as a voiceover and
photographs of the guitar. That guitar can be seen in the background when Billy
is talking about his banjo and his fiddles.
The first thing I would have done differently is that I
would have taken more photographs of some of the instruments. I’ve discovered
that I haven’t been taking enough pictures, so all of mine have to be perfect,
or there might not be a useable copy of the photograph. One of the reasons I
didn’t take enough photographs is that I was trying to keep up with Billy as he
talked about the instrument, usually pointing to the interesting thing as he
was going.
I met with Billy on Saturday afternoons, but never for very
long. I would have loved to have been able to meet with him more often, or to
have been able to stay longer. I had to start processing the video I had taken
and start writing up the blog posts.
The first blog post (his Martin D-28 Dreadnought), was a bit
of an experiment, so I let him talk for a long time, and ended up creating a
video of over 9 minutes long. Were I doing something like this again, I would
cut the video into much smaller parts. I would have many more videos, but I
would have videos that people would be willing to watch. For the next
instruments, I did that - cutting the interview into smaller segments. This
meant that I didn’t have to cut as much, as I was creating more, shorter,
videos. A story that might have been cut to avoid creating a 12 minute video
would be its own video. This would also make it easier to have short videos of
the various, interwoven stories in the blog post, much like the blog post
entitled “Billy’s Fiddles.”
I started taking video using a camera which was set to take
RAW video files. Unfortunately, my computer can’t read RAW video files, so I
had to borrow a computer that could. In the future, I would check and make sure
that the camera is recording in a format I can read. This is important in all
cases, as a digitized copy of something that can’t be read by, for instance,
Macintosh computers, isn’t as useful as it could be.
What I noticed while doing this project is how time
consuming the behind the scenes aspects are. It didn’t take that long to
interview Billy and take pictures. It took over an hour to process the RAW
video into a format I could use. It took a fair amount of time to listen to the
video, cut it into usable segments, and process them out, into YouTube-ready
files. Then it took a while to upload and publish the videos to YouTube. The
getting of the materials didn’t take that long, but getting them web-ready and
on the web took some time. I also had a serious issue with getting photographs
and video off of a device (the program I use decided that it didn’t want to
communicate with that device), and I had to upgrade my operating system to make
it work.
This is an aspect of technologies in special collections
that hadn’t really occurred to me – making sure that everything is up-to-date
and communicates with everything else. That way, when a librarian needs to get
materials from one device onto another platform, it won’t be as complicated.
This librarian also has to make sure that the digital media works on more than
one operating system – both on Apple’s Macintosh and Microsoft’s Windows.
When searching YouTube, there are a lot of issues with
videos having been region locked, so they are only visible to people with an IP
address of that region. If a special collection wants to post materials to
YouTube, they will have to take that into account and make sure that their
materials are not region locked.
As I am uploading interviews about music to YouTube,
copyright is something that I have to be worried about, as Billy plays music to
demonstrate the instrument in his hand. He plays The Beatles (“Norwegian Wood”),
Johnny Cash (“Orange Blossom Special”), Deliverance (“Dueling Banjos”), as well
as classic bluegrass and old-time pieces, including “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”
and “The Tennessee Waltz.” This is something a special collection would have to
worry about, especially if they are planning to digitize and upload anything.
In conclusion, I wouldn’t change much about my project, but
I would take more pictures, meet my friend more often, and worry less about
copyright and how the blog looks.
Billy’s Fiddles – Marketing
Introduction
Billy’s Fiddles, which looks at the musical instruments
owned by Dr. William S. Hamilton, is similar to an oral history project. The
focus of this project is the instruments used in bluegrass, folk and/or old-time
music. At the moment, Billy’s Fiddles is Dr. Hamilton’s collection of
instruments, and a Wordpress blog. The blog has photographs of the instruments
and videos of Dr. Hamilton playing the instruments augmenting story-style blog
posts. Each of the featured instruments has its own blog post, and there are
photographs and video of the instrument in question. For example, Dr. Hamilton
(“Billy” of Billy’s Fiddles) has a 12-string guitar. That guitar has a blog
post (“Half-gimmick, half-genius”), and there are photographs of it, as well as
video of Billy playing the guitar, woven into the story of the guitar.
Audience
The user base of this special collection is
potentially very broad, as it would be anyone interested in the musical
instruments used in bluegrass, folk and/or old-time music. Billy is very
knowledgeable about the subject, and what he knows would be of interest to
someone interested in this genre of music, be it a researcher researching the
genre or muscians, a student majoring in music or Appalachian studies, or
simply a hobbyist who listens to the music or maybe plays one of the
instruments. People who are interested in this genre of music, from a
passionate love to just a passing interest, or in musical instruments in
general would be able to hear Billy talk about them, as well as hear them
played. Billy talks about how one makes a fiddle and how he has repaired
guitars (a bridge which had been attached backward) and banjos (a banjo with a
broken neck). Billy gets into musical theory, discussing the physics behind
banjo tuning and the technicalities of why a 12-string isn’t at perfect
one-octave intervals.
One of the most interesting parts of Billy’s
Fiddles is the oral history side of the instruments in question. The best guitars
and fiddles are still hand-made by luthiers, and most instruments (handmade or
not) have a story attached to them, such as a friend who owns a guitar once
played by John Stewart of the Kingston Trio, or a fiddle made out of wood
bought by a beloved relative who died much too young. Unfortunately, neither of
those instruments made it on to the blog – John’s guitar is in Tennessee, and
the fiddle is not in playable condition due to the passage of time.
Marketing plan
In marketing “Billy’s Fiddles,” I would focus first on
word-of-mouth. Billy is part of a small and close-knit group, who would love to
see this blog. One of the first things I would do would be to email the web
address to a good friend, who is in charge of a local old-time music group, the
same group to which Billy belongs. I would ask her to email the link out to the
group, and ask them to share it with anyone who was interested. I would post
the link on my personal social media accounts, explaining what it was, and I
would let people know that they could share the link if they wanted to. Next, I
would mention it to people I know, perhaps my coworkers, and tell them that it
is a graduate school project. Finally, I would add the url to my email
signatures, much like I have with my LIS 600 blog, where I have posted examples
of my work.
As for the collection itself, I would use the existing
Facebook page to do promotion and marketing. I would continue to add to the
blog, and post to social media and the local music group that I was updating the
blog. Were this collection part of an existing special collection, I would use
their social media and listserves to promote the collection, much the same way
that Z. Smith Reynolds Library shares stories from the Special Collection.
Annotated bibliography
Knopper, Steve. (206, October 05). Dylan’s Top-Charting Strategy. Rolling Stone. Retrieved from: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/dylans-chart-topping-strategy-20061005.
In 2006, Bob Dylan’s Modern
Times debuted at the top of the charts. What did Mr. Dylan do, and how did
he market Modern Times in a way that
made it the number one album? Step one: he followed Bono and U2’s marketing
strategy and made his back catalog available on iTunes, including rare
material. Step two: he used his relationship with Starbucks to sell his album
at their stores. Step three: he hired a major-motion picture director to direct
a music video, staring Scarlett Johansson. Step four: he started an satellite
radio show. Step five: an updated MySpace page. Step six: success.
This article relates to Billy’s Fiddles as it discusses how
to market music to a very wide audience. While the article is talking about a
major recording artist, as opposed to a small special collection, it talks
specifically about how to reach a diverse audience using different types of
social media, from younger audiences – a MySpace page and Scarlett Johansson –
to satellite radio listeners to long-time fans. The end result, in the words of
the Dylan camp, is that “he's one
of the most-searched
people on the Internet” (Knopper – Dylan). With modifications, this sort of
marketing campaign could be used by a small special collection to reach a diverse
audience of unconnected users.
Knopper, Steve. (2014, September 12). U2’s Surprise iTunes Strategy: the Industry Reacts. Rolling Stone. Retrieved from: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/u2s-surprise-itunes-strategy-the-industry-reacts-20140912.
Speaking of U2 and marketing strategy… As the article
mentions, the recording industry is having issues with the new way of listening
to music. Users are less likely to buy entire albums, but freely stream music,
through websites such as Pandora and Spotify. The article talks about U2’s long
partnership with Apple, starting with the U2-brand iPod. It does not mention,
however, that U2’s “Vertigo” was the soundtrack to one of the original iPod
adverts. The author talked to various producers and managers, and asked them if
this (surprise albums from megastars) is the future of music.
Much like the article about Mr. Dylan, this article relates
to Billy’s Fiddles because it talks about a one-time marketing stunt. It is
also a fairly good example of “what not to do,” though the stunt got many
people talking. About U2. While a small special collection would have a hard
time pulling something like this off, they could look into doing a one-time
sort of thing. Perhaps a membership deal for donors, where they would get
something in return for a donation, but the item would be a surprise. When
special collections do the unexpected, it gets people talking about them, and gets
people interested in seeing what they will do next. They could also look into
partnering with a larger organization, much like U2 and Apple, for funding and
users.
Homenda, Nick. (2011). Music Libraries on YouTube. Music Reference Services Quarterly, 14, 30-45. DOI: 10.1080/10588167.2011.571486.
This article is a study of how music libraries use YouTube
and how easy it is to find videos about or created by music libraries. The
researcher used YouTube’s search feature to find and identify videos. While
this article is not specifically about marketing, it goes in depth about how
important it is for a music library to have a YouTube presence.
This article relates to Billy’s Fiddles because it talks
about how important YouTube is for music libraries. Billy’s Fiddles is a small
collection of stories about various instruments, and has a YouTube channel. The
researcher gave suggestions as to how to make a YouTube video that would help
someone find the physical library, if they wanted to. A video that shows where
Dr. Hamilton’s instruments are held could be an interesting addition to the
collection. The researcher also talks about how vital it is for libraries to
use social media.
News Reporter-Staff News Editor. (2016, May 14). C.F. Martin &Co.; Ace Hotel and Martin Guitar Announce Expanded Partnership to Support Artists and Communities with Music Outreach Events and Micro Grants. Marketing Weekly News. Retrieved from: http://uncg.worldcat.org/oclc/6033124232.
This article is about how Ace Hotels have teamed up with
Martin Guitars to create, amongst other ventures, a microloan program for the
arts in Pittsburgh and New Orleans, two cities in need of that sort of funding.
This is part of the ever-evolving relationship between Ace and Martin, which
has included concerts at Ace Hotels.
This article relates to Billy’s Fiddles because of how two
organizations are working together to achieve greatness. In Billy’s Fiddles’
case, it would be in the form of a grant from LSTA or another, similar,
organization for money to complete their digitization efforts, as well as to
create a digital library which anyone could view from anywhere in the world.
This would more than likely involve moving the content from the social media-like
sites (like WordPress) to more professional sites, including ContentDM or
Omeka. This article is also about how to market oneself (in the article, a
musician in Pittsburgh or New Orleans) in order to be awarded grant funding.
Special Collections - the Louis Round Wilson
Library. Southern Folklife Collection. Retrieved from:
http://library.unc.edu/wilson/sfc/ and https://www.facebook.com/sfolklife/?fref=ts.
This resource is an example of how a music collection
markets itself. This specific special collection is the Southern Folklife
Collection, held by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is a
collection of music, history, music history, and Southern culture. The
collection uses Facebook to interest and attract users and donors.
This resource is relevant to Billy’s Fiddles because it is
an example of how a special collection uses social media as a marketing
strategy: Facebook. While a Facebook page is only one possible way to use
social media to promote and market a special collection, this specific example
is am exemplar of how to do a social media account for a music special
collection. Personal experience with users of this page has shown just how
important proper social media exposure can be.
Gallo, Phil. (2012, October 20). Music Marketing 101. Billboard, 124(37), 10. Retrieved from http://uncg.worldcat.org/oclc/5753579626.
This article is about a class at the University of Central
Oklahoma who “got real-world experience marketing real-world band” (Gallo).
Their marketing strategy got the band enough attention to be signed by a record
company, and a recording contract. The students used social media (such as
Facebook) to market the band, as well as created a website for the band. The
band did have some, minor, national appeal as songwriters, but the students
wanted the bands newest album and singles to chart.
This is relevant to Billy’s Fiddles because a small group of
people got a small local band a record contract through (more or less) social
media buzz. This is the sort of thing a small special collection could do, by
using their social media accounts and website to promote themselves. While the
band did have a marketing team, the people working at the small special
collection could do the same thing, and potentially create national buzz for
the collection.
Salo Jari, Lankinen, Mikko and Mäntymäki, Matti. (2013). The Use of Social Media for Artist Marketing: Music Industry Perspectives and Consumer Motivations. International Journal on Media Management, 15(1), 23-41. DOI: 10.1080/14241277.2012.755682.
This article is about how the music industry in Finland uses
social media to promote album sales and music consumption. They did multiple
case studies to see how users use social media in relation to music, and how
the music industry uses social media to attract users.
This is relevant to Billy’s Fiddles because it is a case
study of how people use social media in relation to music. People use social
media to find new music, follow music groups they like, and meet people who
like the same type of music or the same group. This study applies to everyone
from chart-topping major artists to small special collections.
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