Irish Traditional Music Archive
Taisce Cheol Dúchais Éireann
TO COLLECTORS OF IRISH TRADITIONAL MUSIC WORLDWIDE
Dear Collectors,
Almost twenty years after its foundation, the Irish Traditional Music Archive has assembled the largest collection of Irish traditional music in existence, as detailed elsewhere on this website. We hold, for example, over 25,000 sound recordings, 16,000 books and serials, 9,000 melodies in digital form, 6,500 ballad sheets and pieces of sheet music, 10,000 photographs and negatives, 2,500 programmes, 1,100 videos and DVDs, 400 music manuscripts, etc., etc. And these items are catalogued on computer in great detail – an enormous body of information available free of charge to anyone who visits the Archive.
The collection therefore forms the most comprehensive picture of the world of Irish music, contemporary and historic, available anywhere. It is growing daily, and its information coverage improves daily. The Archive is a securely established Irish national institution, and a premier world centre for accessing and researching Irish traditional music.
The Archive understands `collection' in a range of senses – from materials professionally recorded over years of activity to casual recordings or photographs made on a visit to a session or festival in Ireland or elsewhere. As a collector of Irish traditional music in any of these senses – whether of commercial recordings or field recordings, of printed materials or of photographs, etc. – you may be interested in having items from your collections represented in the Archive's collection? If so, we would be very pleased to receive them.
If you donate items, or copies of items, from your collections to the Archive, we undertake to add them to our holdings with your name as that of donor, to hold and preserve them indefinitely, to catalogue them, and to then make them available for listening/viewing or study to visitors to the Archive. We will scrupulously guard all your legal and moral rights in them, and will not make copies of them for others, publish them, or otherwise use them without your prior written agreement.
We would also be very keen to acquire associated documentation of any kind if it exists - such as field notes, catalogues and indexes, biographical details, collecting policies, etc. - anything which would put your collections in context and help people appreciate fully the meaning of what they contain. We are interested in collections of innovative and crossover material as well as of conservative and deeply traditional material.
We urge you to make such donations primarily so that the art form of Irish traditional music worldwide may be more comprehensively documented, even if there are practical advantages to you in such a donation. We are interested in any donations however small, whether a photocopy of a single page or a few snaps taken on holiday - every single item is part of the total mosaic of Irish traditional music performance.
We look forward to receiving any donations you may make, and to cooperating with you in making an increasingly comprehensive public collection of Irish traditional music past and present.
Donations and queries about donations can be sent to the Irish Traditional Music Archive, 73 Merrion Square, Dublin 2 (tel. +353-1-661 9699; fax +353-1-662 4585; email donations@itma.ie)
Best wishes,
Nicholas Carolan
Director
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