How the Irish Traditional Music Archive went digital

Today, Europeana and the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Ireland, are holding a conference entitled 'Funding digitisation: can accessible cultural heritage fuel social and economic growth?' at Dublin Castle, Ireland, as part of the Digital Agenda Assembly and the Irish Presidency of the EU. To celebrate, we have a guest blog from Grace Toland, Librarian of the Irish Traditional Music Archives, which is now accessible through Europeana.

The Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA) is now celebrating its 25th year. Since its inception in 1987, it has amassed the world’s largest multimedia collection of materials relating to Irish traditional song, instrumental music and dance. It is a not-for-profit national resource centre which is open free of charge to the public.

© Irish Traditional Music Archive

ITMA has embraced the potential of digital access and the sharing of resources where possible. This ethos led us to sign our first Europeana Data Provider Agreement on 1 February 2011. Since then, we have contributed metadata for almost 2,000 digital items for inclusion in the Europeana portal and plan to double this figure in 2013/2014. We supported the publishing of metadata under the terms of the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Declaration in 2012. ITMA would like to see the Europeana portal continue to gather and grow and to receive the funding necessary to make this possible.

Computerised databases have been used since 1987 and the Archive has adopted other digital equipment and digital functions as technology has become available. Currently field and studio recording, cataloguing, indexing, audio and video storage, music engraving, book design and layout, audio editing and web publishing are all carried out digitally in ITMA. It has had a web presence since 1992 and in April 2011 launched a major re-design and upgrade of its website.

Video recording of ITMA staff in ITMA Studio, 2012, © Irish Traditional Music Archive

The focus of the new site is the Digital Library, providing remote access to audio, text, video, images and interactive scores at item level and also contextualised in thematic collections. Contemporary items are presented with the agreement of the performer and historical items generally come from older material which is now out of copyright. The DL also includes interactive music scores created by ITMA staff using Sibelius Scorch. These music notations can be viewed on screen and played back in user-friendly ways. We add digital material regularly with a planned programme of media selection to provide users with a taste of the variety of items held in our premises in Dublin.

We digitise selected media in-house, adhering to international standards for sound, images, text and video. Master copies at full resolution are archived on servers in-house. These master files are then copied and used to create web-friendly versions which are stored using Amazon web services. For print items, we also make a PDF quality file to allow downloading. Videos are accessed through the ITMA YouTube channel. Once we have created our files for upload, we then attach these and create metadata using the content management system, Expression Engine. We use the Dublin Core metadata format. In order to contextualise these individual items, they are then linked to a playlist, gallery or printed items collections page. The user can then read a short introductory piece which puts the individual item in its traditional music context. Users can therefore browse thematically or, alternatively, search for individual items.

Earlier this year, ITMA embarked on a new delivery platform, a microsite which linked approximately 2,000 digital items relating to the singing tradition of the Inishowen Peninsula in Co. Donegal. The Inishowen Song Project was a partnership between a local traditional singing organisation, the Inishowen Traditional Singers’ Circle (ITSC) and ITMA with funding provided by Leader. ITSC wished to make field recordings freely available as a teaching tool and to create a tangible record of its invisible local heritage of traditional singing. The project required sensitivity in presentation, ease of navigation and its own identity. Over two years, 600 audio and video recordings were digitised, as well as images and related publications. Songs were transcribed and made available as PDFs, biographies and metadata were created, linking Roud Folk Song Index numbers were attached and all items were related to each other. ITMA intends to partner with other organisations using the microsite model in the coming years.

ITMA is proud to be part of this European cultural project, and to see Irish traditional music sit alongside its cultural cousins for all to share. #AllezCulture