Baker, S. and Huber A. (forthcoming) ‘Saving “rubbish”: preserving popular music’s material culture in amateur archives and museums’, in S. Cohen, R. Knifton, M. Leonard and L. Roberts (eds) Sites of Popular Music Heritage: Memories, Histories, Places. Routledge. Saving ‘rubbish’: preserving popular music’s material culture in amateur archives and museums Sarah Baker & Alison Huber (Griffith University, Australia) I guess it all goes back to the initial reason for the formation of the organization, and many of the ... jazz aficionados were concerned, what would happen to their material in the future, as to whether it would be preserved in some way, or whether in fact it would just be thrown on the dump heap. Their families were no longer interested, their children and grandchildren were not interested in this type of music ... so they were very concerned about all this material would be wasted and just thrown away … and [that was] the reason why we came into being. So logically following from that … when people are needing to downsize their homes, if they’ve got to move into a smaller place … they may need to get rid of or offload much of their collection or their material, and so we have become the repository of a lot of that in various different ways. Much of it is very, very good indeed. Much of it is not so good, and much of it we can’t do anything much with at all. However, we do our best ... (volunteer, Victorian Jazz Archive, Australia, 31 May 2011) This chapter follows our interest in the emergence of a growing number of amateur-run collecting organisations (archives; museums), which we have come to term ‘DIY/do -it- yourself institutions’ (see Baker & Huber forthcoming a). 1 Begun by enthusiasts who are 1 This research sits within a broader project, Popular music and cultural memory: localised popular music histories and their significance for national music industries, which is funded under the Australian Research Council’s (ARC) Discovery Project scheme for three years (2010-12, DP1092910). Chief Investigators on the project are Andy Bennett (Griffith University), Shane Homan (Monash University), Sarah Baker (Griffith University) and Peter Doyle (Macquarie University), with Research Fellow Alison