Folk music

This paper reports on the digitisation of the folk song and music collected by Tom Munnelly which was conducted as part of the UCD Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive (IVRLA) series of demonstrator research projects. Between 1971 and 2007, Tom Munnelly recorded over 1,500 tapes (over 20,000 songs) of folksong, folk music and folklore, the largest collection of traditional song compiled by a single individual in Ireland. This research project set out to digitise the first year of this collection, which is held on reel-to-reel tape and therefore is at significant risk of obsolescence and deterioration, in order to preserve this important material and make it more widely available. The remit of these projects was to provide digital research resources and to show how digital repositories could not only provide access to archival research materials but could also present material in new ways and suggest themes for further research. This project fulfilled this remit by digitising over 1,100 individual songs and instrumental pieces, creating a detailed catalogue to aid further research, and making a sample of the digitised pieces available online. The paper reports on the stages of the project, discusses the technical and ethical issues encountered, gives an overview of the material digitised, and highlights the urgent need for this digitisation work to be continued in order to preserve this valuable collection.