By Sophie Ryan

In May 2023, ITMA received Capacity Heritage funding from The Heritage Council of Ireland to support Rights and Public Access to ITMA collections online. As a Rights and Public Access Officer, I have been working on this project since August, alongside Rónán Galvin and Brian Doyle, with guidance from Maeve Gebruers, Adam Girard and Treasa Harkin who have been overseeing the project and supporting us throughout.

Coming towards the end of the project for this year, we have cleared rights for upwards of 150 musicians and recordists, which will allow us to make a huge number of non-commercial recordings available on our online media player.

Prior to commencing the project, we received training from Rights Consultant Barry Lynn, to become familiar with the legalities of copyrights and accessibility and the workflow. As a team, we met on a weekly basis to share our progress. A database was created and maintained. Here, we recorded diligent search work on rights holders to obtain contact information, detailing both our efforts and all correspondence, careful to ensure any access restrictions are reflected accurately in collection metadata and in archival systems. We also logged unsuccessful attempts to find rights holders. In such cases, the material will be considered ‘orphan works’; creative material that is protected by copyright, but where contact information for the rights holders or their next of kin cannot be found.

Using our online database, we compiled lists of all relevant non-commercial archival recordings for each rights holder, providing as much detail as was required. The lists were sent to the respective rights holders for reference. Often, musicians were delighted to hear that we had recordings of various specific performances from concerts or festivals a long time ago.

Naturally, a large portion of this work focused on speaking with the various rights holders to explain the project and discuss the various recordings we hoped to include. This was done through emails, phone calls, post and visits.

One of my highlights so far was meeting Bobby Gardiner and Seán Ó Sé.  I visited Seán and Bobby in October. Chatting about the material we had in the collections brought back lots of memories for both Seán and Bobby which were lovely to hear about. I spent another great morning with Rita O’Reilly, wife of the late Paddy Moloney speaking about Paddy and his music and listening to some of the recordings we had. I was privileged to speak with family of lots of other musicians such as Liam O’Flynn, Tony MacMahon, Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin and Chris Droney as well as Christy Moore, to name but a few.

It has been great to get a comprehensive insight into the vast amount of non-commercial material in ITMA, from music and song, to interviews and lectures. Having engaged with as much of this material as I could during my time working on this project, I can see the invaluable benefit in the preservation and accessibility of this material. It is wonderful to be able to make this material widely accessible. Similarly, in cases where musicians have passed away, many families have been delighted to hear that we have this material, which often include recordings they were not aware of and had not heard before. Rónán, Brian and I have each come across plenty of exceptional recordings across the collections we have been working on, as well as plenty of brilliant anecdotes from the musicians.

There has been an overwhelmingly positive response to this project from those we engaged with, and the goodwill of musicians and their families is something that has been evident since the project began. Many people we spoke to informed us that they had collections of music that they would love to donate to the archive. There were also many rights holders who were incredibly helpful in providing leads for individuals that we found difficult to track down otherwise.

Of course, this would not be possible without the co-operation and generosity of each of the musicians and families, for which we are very thankful. It has been a real privilege to engage musicians and their family members who were so willing to share their music.

We are really looking forward to making this material available to stream and continuing to work towards enabling greater digital access to valuable heritage.

On behalf of all at ITMA, I would like to extend a huge thanks to the Heritage Council for this funding. The value of this investment has been evident since day one and we are looking forward to having these recordings on our media player for musicians to access freely all over the world.

Written by Sophie Ryan, ITMA Rights and Public Access Officer, November 2023