The Contract

Somehow it seems very appropriate that as the "music" group we would be drawing up our contract!  What daunted us initially I believe was the idea of committing ourselves to a plan before we really had a handle on the scope and content of the archives available to us.  However, a pattern of interest had naturally emerged, perhaps even before we stepped into the Carolina Room of Charlotte's Main branch Library.  Ian, as a musician himself had naturally turned his attention to the more contemporary music scene of Charlotte; Reggie was clearly drawn by the social and political history associated with Biddleville's Excelsior Club and was anxious to discover more about local African American music; Anna took a bee line to local radio and started her research immediately; and I, Tina, felt the need to look a little more broadly at Charlotte's mainstream music, classical and “Broadway”.
How to organize these interests into a cohesive whole, and especially when the Democratic National Convention stole away our major archive for a week, was perhaps our major obstacle.  We first looked at time periods, since we knew we wanted to map changes through time, but the overlaps were too complex to make this effective as a structure and we could not hope to cover the whole span of history anyway.  Genres were also explored, but that too refused to create a satisfactory architecture for our web site.  Music does not fit itself nicely into neat boxes.
It was at 3am after long discussion in the archive the afternoon before that I awoke to a thought.  What we were looking at and talking about all along after all were venues.  We had discussed clubs, recording studios, auditoriums, hotel ballrooms etc.  These were the shells that held the music together.  By focusing on these we could delve into music genres, all manner of musicians, the great range of audiences and all the wealth of history that might be attached without having to be comprehensive and without creating inappropriate boundaries. 
With this frame in place it was easy to line up interests with broad areas to research and to feel that our work would be evenly distributed.
Thinking through our schedule and choosing Omeka tools that will enable us to present our research in the most effective way seemed to flow from our vision of the project.  Venues allowed us to do separate work but to have a cohesive whole which can be plotted by map and time line.  Since our idea was to select venues to represent the diversity of Charlotte’s music past our web site could be a collecting point for others to add their images and stories of other venues.
From the beginning I think our whole group was pretty excited about our project.  What is daunting of course is………are those special images really there in the archives where we have only scratched the surface?