User:Bristolfolk

I am a freelance author with books published on recorded music history, relational database design and development, biography, British railway recording history, and fiction. Work has also been published by Penguin Books/Rough Guides, BBC Music Magazine, Record Collector magazine, Pines Express (the bulletin of the Somerset & Dorset Railway Trust), Semaphore (the Avon Valley Railway Heritage Trust's in-house magazine), the proceedings for the 51st Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, and Student Accountant. I have also contributed to various CD releases, including translation of inlay booklet notes to English, sourcing and digitisation of rare vinyl records for authorized reissue projects, proofreading, and filling information gaps in record labels' own archives.

Several recorded music history books have been nominated for international academic awards for research excellence by the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC). The Immediate Discography: the First 20 Years, won awards in 2017 for both myself as author/researcher, and as publisher. My 2020 publication, The British Classical Record Industry, 1945 to 1959: Fidelity and Formats, is currently amongst the finalists for the 2021 excellence awards. I don't suppose for one minute that it will win.

Other work includes freelance business analysis and marking postgraduate professional exams in business analysis, risk, ethics, governance and related areas. All of these areas are ones in which I consider myself competent to contribute to Wikipedia.

My main area of interest (when not writing) is record collecting (with the emphasis on original vinyl releases) and documenting record labels. In terms of collecting, my main interest (apart from a fascination with the covermounts distributed with BBC Music Magazine) is the Saydisc group of labels. I have been collecting these since the 1970s, and seriously researching/documenting the label since around 2002. I am now in the odd situation that, if Saydisc wants to know something about items no longer on catalogue, it asks me. I am, however, independent of, and not connected to, the company or to either of the owners (other than probably making myself a pest every now and then with various trivial questions about records they have long since forgotten releasing). I have tried to make the Saydisc article as objective as possible.