The Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA) is committed to providing free, universal access to the rich cultural tradition of Irish music, song and dance. If you’re able, we’d love for you to consider a donation. Any level of support will help us preserve and grow this tradition for future generations.
ITMA was awarded Capacity Heritage funding in May 2023 from The Heritage Council of Ireland.
The first phase of this project has begun in earnest. A process around the clearance of rights to ITMA audio collections in order to maximise online public access is being developed by Rights consultant Barry Lynn. Barry was the Rights Officer for the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage Project (UOSH) for National Museums Northern Ireland. He is passionate and meticulous about rights-clearance work and is knowledgeable about traditional music and its performers. It is hoped that by the end of the project ITMA will have developed a centralised resource for rights and public access for use into the future.
The second phase of the project will see two Rights and Public Access Officers employed to clear rights on ITMA’s online audio collections. These officers will begin the work of rights clearance for online dissemination at the beginning of Heritage Week 2023. A rights database will be maintained in order to document and manage evidence of the due diligence process undertaken and to ensure any access restrictions are reflected accurately in collection metadata and in archival systems.
During Heritage Week 2023 ITMA will provide updates about the progress of this project and share a selection of audio recordings cleared by this process.
This June, I was privileged to be contacted by Archivist Maeve Gebruers about working for ITMA. Having recently received funding from the Heritage Council, the archive needed assistance with developing a workflow for dealing with copyright issues for materials in their audio archive. My previous experience as Rights Officer for the British Library and National Museums Northern Ireland’s collaborative project Unlocking Our Sound Heritage (UOSH) had put me on their radar, and in particular, our team’s appearance at the 2019 British and Irish Sound Archivists (BISA) Conference, held in Dublin.
UOSH was a trailblazing project in many ways, and a lot of experience was gained in dealing with the myriad issues surrounding copyright and GDPR as applied to heritage audio materials.
I was invited to meet the ITMA team and to explore their wonderful Georgian base off Merrion Square in Dublin. Shelves upon shelves of specialist literature and donated materials impressed on me the scale and scope of ITMA’s collections. I was particularly interested in the recording studio in the basement, manned by Digital Archivist Adam Girard, and Audio Digitisation Assistant Iarlaith Mac Gabhann full of vintage machines and some choice modern ones too. I’d love to spend longer down there!
After some informative chats about what was needed and an introduction to the AtoM archival catalogue, I set off to draft up the necessary paperwork and training materials for the Rights Officers who were to come after me. It will fall to them to do the copyright clearance work. The goal of this work is to secure permissions that will allow ITMA to make collections more widely available to the public through ITMA’s online platforms. This will be achieved by making contact with collectors and performers in the traditional music community. Since time was pressing, creating a streamlined and efficient workflow for them was essential.
As a test, when I had things in working order, Maeve provided me with catalogue information for the Hugh Shields Collection, and contact information for Hugh’s widow Lisa. After some pleasant time speaking with Lisa, licences were exchanged and spreadsheets updated, and the project had begun!
I’m very excited to see how things will progress from here, and hope that having clarity around rights issues will enhance global access to the valuable audio collections at ITMA.
– Barry Lynn
In February 2023, ITMA was awarded funding from The Heritage Council of Ireland for its project “Jigs and Audio Reels: Preserving Ireland’s Cultural Heritage through Audio Digitisation.”
This project supports Ireland’s intangible cultural heritage by obtaining a state-of-the-art reel-to-reel machine. This will allow the playback & digitisation of 1,000s of open reel recordings in ITMA.
During Heritage Week 2023, ITMA Digital Archivist Adam Girard and Audio Digitisation Assistant Iarlaith Mac Gabhann have hosted a series of engaging in-person daily lunchtime workshops. The focus of these workshops is to showcase ITMA’s reel-to-reel playback machine and how it works. Participants have learned about ITMA’s audio digitsation process, and even been given the chance to thread a vintage reel-to-reel tape recording onto the machine themselves and listen to the playback.
The Heritage Council has historically funded traditional preservation methods in ITMA. ITMA’s strategic plan focuses on moving from physical to digital preservation. This project will provide an essential tool used to digitise ITMA’s audio collections over the next 5 years. This process will allow ITMA to conduct important digital preservation steps. It will facilitate delivery of these culturally important materials for use locally, nationally & internationally. The outcomes of these activities will have a long term impact beyond 5 years & materials will be preserved in perpetuity for generations to come.
