Irish Traditional Music Archive: sound recordings

The Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA) has many sound recordings available online. A Christmas Collection, compiled as an Advent Calendar is online there at the moment.

Irish Traditional Music Archive: online Advent Calendar

From the ITMA site: New tranches of sample sound recordings are made available on ITMA website every two months for the personal enjoyment and interest of users. They represent only a small proportion of the sound recordings of Irish music held for public access in the Archive, and are chosen to indicate the variety of materials available. They may not be used for commercial purposes.

Irish Traditional Music Archive - new online catalogue

The Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA) / Taisce Cheol Dúchais Éireann, (73 Merrion Square, Dublin 2) is a national reference archive and resource centre for the traditional song, instrumental music and dance of Ireland. It is a public not-for-profit facility which is open, free of charge, to anyone with an interest in the contemporary and historical artforms of Irish traditional music.

You can search ITMA's online catalogue, which currently reflects its holding of commercially published materials (sound recordings, printed materials & visual materials) and photographs.Thecatalogue now contains some 55,000 catalogue records. These records cover (in brief format) the currentITMA holdings of

• commercial sound recordings (cylinders, 78s, SPs, EPs, LPs, cassettes, and CDs);

• printed materials (song & instrumental music collections, studies, tutors, theses, reference works, sheet music, ballad sheets, chapbooks, periodicals, contextual publications, and some 2,500 festival and event programmes);

• visual materials (photographic prints, postcards and other still images, and commercial VHSs and DVDs).

More detailed records, including contents, are available in the Archive.

New material will continue to be systematicallyadded to the online catalogue.

Not yet included in the online catalogue are non-commercial field and private recordings, articles from periodicals,offprints, manuscripts, artefacts, digital photographs, the remaining festivaland event programmes, and library ephemera such as posters and leaflets.

Muchof this material however is covered by the ITMA in-house catalogue which isfreely available to visitors.

New Proquest/Dialog platform (former Dialog/Datastar databases)

There are some issues with the URLs on the new Proquest/Dialog platform: AUEI, BREI, ERIC, and for databases formerly on the Dialog/Datastar platform, IPA, BNI, and in particular DIFT.

DIFT is not showing up on the new platform. The Dialog/Datastar platform is due to be taken down at the end of this month, December 2011. We are working with the platform providers to get the issue resolved so there is no loss of access.

The other databases are working with the new links at the moment, but please let Clíona know at once if there are any problems with them. 

Wiley Online Library downtime Sat. 17 December 2011

Due to essential maintenance by Wiley, the WOL will be unavailable for up to 3 hours from 10am, Saturday 17th December 2011.

New ProQuest/Dialog platform: IPAB, International ERIC (BREI & AUEI) - new platform

Further to the October posting on IPAB/DIFT, BREI, AUEI, the new Proquest/Dialog platform, for databases formerly on the Dialog/Datastar platform, is now live.

The finalised links will be updated in the catalogue soon.

A range of brief training modules to familiarise yourself with the new features are here: http://www.dialog.com/proquestdialog/