Institute of Popular Music Archive

The Institute of Popular Music Archive is extensive, significant and wide ranging and consists of materials gifted to the IPM since its establishment in 1988, and our aim is to make these materials publicly accessible.

The archive contains a collection of over 80,000 vinyl records and thousands of reel-to-reels, as well as CDs, cassettes, and a substantial collection of paper archives. Among the paper archives are collections of British popular music newspapers and of various music magazines and fanzines. The Archive includes some rare material and a wide range of special donations, including:

• The Robert Shelton Archive
• The Robert Pring Mill Collection
• The Mikis Theodorakis Collection
• The Sylvia Patterson Jazz Collection
• The Radio City FM Collection
• The Karl Dallas Folk and Traditional Music Archive
• The David Friedman Collection
• The Eddie Calvert Collection
• The Roy Openshaw collection
• The Thompson and Gutman collection
• The Radio Merseyside Session Reel-to-Reel Collection
• The Mackenzie Dance Band Collection
• The IASPM Archive

To enquire about the archive, please contact the IPM Archivist in the Special Collections & Archives team: scastaff@liverpool.ac.uk

The following articles provide further details of the archive and some of the materials it contains, as well as details on the IPM and its history: 

Collections at the IPM

The Institute of Popular Music at the University of Liverpool

Interview with former IPM director David Horn published in Popular Music History (Volume 3, Number 1, 2008)