This week I analyzed the Collection of Heavy Metal Music Material as the finding aid for a physical archival collection at UCLA. The aid notes include DVDs, recordings, books, magazines, photographs, flyers, ephemera, fanzines, memorabilia, etc. from the late 1960s to the current time that gives us some background info on heavy metal artists and bands. It also talks a lot about heavy metal and its history and it introduces the sub-genres of the heavy metal like death metal and glam metal.
We could create a narrative on this genre of music based on photographs, for example, we can see how the concerts looked like and where the artists chose to tour which gives us an idea of where heavy metal was most popular and enjoyed. We can also develop a narrative based on the biographies and magazine articles, but we have limited resources and we don’t know much about different states and countries. There could be a considered biased point of view because people who wrote these articles are heavy metal fans and that could be looked at as biased so the only way to counter-act that is to make sure there are article written by unbiased and neutral people or maybe even an article was written by someone who doesn’t appreciate this type of music to see a broader scope of events. Another point of view could be relatives or close friends to some of the artists because I believe that would bring in a few interesting ideas.
It’s a very interesting collection and I think it has a lot of great articles, maybe scouting for a few more articles with different point of views would make it even better, but overall I really enjoyed what it told me about heavy metal.
An interesting point about the biased nature of the collection, which could also be applied to many archival collections that were curated by people with a vested interest in the topic and so perhaps chose to include and exclude certain sources from the archive.