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.
In 2023 ITMA received Capacity funding from the Heritage Council of Ireland for our project on Rights and Public Access to ITMA online collections.
The aim of the project was to seek permission from rights holders to make non-commercial recordings available to stream online. This work will allow us to increase access to archival material, while respecting donors, recordists, artists and copyright.
As we reach the end of the year, we are delighted to share that in total, contact has been made with over 400 rights holders. 320 of those contacted, have generously granted permission for their recordings to be made available to stream online.
In some cases, rights holders hold rights as a performer and a recordist
The majority of rights holders cleared were Irish (256). In addition, 49 American-based rights holders were cleared and 13 from the United Kingdom.
Of the 320 rights holders who granted permission, 64 of them will be registered under the ‘EUIPO Orphan Works’ database.
Orphan works refer to material for which is still in copyright, but where search work has not resulted in successfully tracking down a rights holder or their family. Throughout the project, we carefully recorded our various attempts to find contact information for these rights holders.
We wish to express our gratitude to each of the rights holders and their families for their generosity and co-operation with us on this project. We also wish to thank the Heritage Council for the invaluable output facilitated by this funding.
We look forward to sharing some of this material in the new year.
