Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Irish Traditional Music Archives

Budget:
As ITMA are an archive, and their entire collection is reference I couldn't really get an idea of budget but Grace reckoned about €4k a year was about right.

Donations:
As an archive they take everything, regardless of duplicates - who's donating, annotations etc can be as important as the material itself.

No real government resources beyond one collection of tunes published in the 1940s and this is still quite relevant. I need to get more detail on this.

Finding resources:
ITMA publish a bibliography and discography every two months on anything related to Irish traditional music. This includes books, sheet music, albums, articles. ITMA bibliography - see ITMA website under 'recent publications'. They find materials via Google Alerts & ABE Books is another important source.

Weeding:
N/A for the archives at the moment.

The ITMA website is quite good for content, providing a definition of Irish Traditional Music - I don't seem to be able to give website addresses here.

Some other points -

Collection is divided into three areas - song, instrumental, dance.
Main aims are collection, preservation, organise and make available.

Some collection to look at for inspiration -
Boston College
Notre Dame/Irish Studies
Scottish National Library - good resource for ballad sheets
Queens

I'm not sure if we'll really ned to delve that deeply after today's class but links are there anyway.

Key Books -
Fintan Vallely's Companion to ITM (new edition due)
Fleischmann's Source of Irish Traditional Music
Encyclopaedia of music in Ireland (not yet released)

Some good free resources -
Steve Roud's folk song index
JSTOR
SMI Music Theses Register
Journalofmusic.com

Finally they've given me a list of audio resources so I'm going to meet the sound archivist, hopefully before our meeting next week and take it from there.

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