Technology and history collide at the Irish Traditional Music Archive's new home, writes Siobhán Long

'We're a multi-media archive, not just a sound collection repository," the Irish Traditional Music Archive's director, Nicholas Carolan, declares. "Archiving is all about collection, preservation, organisation and giving access to the maximum number of people to that material."

ITMA's new home, formerly the home of the Architectural Archive and the Irish Manuscripts Commission, is a magnificently restored Georgian building in an enviable location on the south side of Merrion Square. ITMA is glorying in its new home which provides three times the space of its previous location at 63 Merrion Square.

"In our previous site, material kept pouring in, and we were silting up," Carolan admits. "We had less and less space to work in. While all our collection was available, it wasn't on open access. And now that we have more space, we hope to seek out material more proactively, to engage in more field collection. We're recorded close to 1,300 people since we started our own field collection at festivals, concerts and in our own studio, so we're simply going to do more of everything, and at a higher level."

LIKE MANY GRACIOUS collections, ITMA's origins are modest. Funded by the Arts Council to the tune of £27,000 in 1987, its first collection consisted of the personal archive of the late Brendan Breathnach, a civil servant who worked in the Department of Agriculture until he was seconded to the Department of Education where he could give full vent to his love of collecting: jigs, hornpipes, slow airs and reels.

Breathnach's legacy spanned the gamut of printed items, manuscripts, sound recordings, and photographs to a total of more than 3,000 items. It was the artistic equivalent of seed capital for the archive, enabling it to take a confident first step into the world of collection. Today, ITMA has corralled more than 25,000 sound recordings, some 16,000 books and serials, more than 4,000 ballad sheets, 3,500 items of sheet music, 9,000 melodies and more than 9,500 photographs and small paper images.

With half a million records in its database, ITMA has quietly assumed a "must-see" position in the world of traditional music for musicians, singers and dancers, not to mention writers and academics in hot pursuit of an elusive tune or an obscure lyric. ITMA's genesis coincided, Nicholas Carolan believes, with a period of increasing awareness of the value of preserving and sharing the past with the present.

"It's one thing to talk about gold Celtic ornaments or treasured items", he says, "but viewing a record catalogue or a concert poster as culturally valuable is another thing. The fact is, though, that all our legacy items, from cylinders to 78s to LPs, cassettes - now all obsolete technologies - all contain music, song and dance which must be collected or preserved, or it will disappear. It's about making it useful and useable, and not about collecting it in some dusty room."

One of ITMA's greatest strengths was its future-proofing decision since its inception in 1987 to computerise its archive. Now that it has been given acres of additional space, ITMA can bring its entire collection out of the closet, affording visitors full access to its catalogue.

"Every track, every artist, every song, every tune on every recording, every title of every book and all of our sound recordings are stored on our database," Carolan explains, and while this is currently only accessible via ITMA itself, plans are afoot to render it accessible online, so that traditional music aficionados can benefit from the archive, whether in Boston, Berlin or Ballydehob. Carolan is also anxious to use the internet to distribute actual archive material.

"Recently we had all our cylinders digitised in France," he says, "and we plan to put a selection of those up on the web. Obviously copyright is a major consideration, so we're only talking about material that is copyright-free, or material which the copyright holder would give us permission to upload."

The beauty of the archiving process is that it's a continual one, and can never be deemed complete. Preserving the original format is one of the archive's priorities, Carolan insists. "Even though we've had our cylinders digitised, we keep them," he explains. "You don't know what you're going to get off them in 10 or 20 years' time as techniques improve."

ITMA's library is the archive's set piece, an Aladdin's cave of recordings and books. Among the aged recordings and well-thumbed reference books sit a swat team of Apple e-Macs, poised for action. This is where technology and history coalesce. Visitors can search across several databases, listen to music, watch a DVD, or play a tune on the archive's keyboards (with headphones, of course) from a single location.

IN THE BOWELS of ITMA's Georgian home lurks the genesis of a state-of-the-art recording studio. It's a startling sight, amid street-level coal holes, light-pouring sash windows and magnificent vaults to see soundproof doors and window shutters, burly cabling and preparations for a springed dance floor (all the better to capture the complex foot falls of a jig, reel or set in full flight).

Technologically cutting-edge, ITMA's studio is likely to become the holy grail for musicians, singers and dancers anxious to have their artistry preserved in digital form, if not in aspic. It's a far cry from Ciarán MacMathúna's tales of placing rocks on the accelerator of his old Radio Éireann van, just to keep the batteries in his recording equipment sufficiently charged to capture a session.

ITMA has wisely harnessed television, too, as a crucial point of contact with its audience. The archive has chosen to televise much of its video archive on the TV series, Come West Along The Road, now in its ninth season. This series attracts a viewership of 250,000 per episode in its English-language version, and 90,000 in its Irish-language version.

Outreach of this kind is extremely important to ITMA, Carolan admits. "How could you even begin to get a quarter of a million people into this building?" he laughs.

The sight of an original 78 recording of renowned Sligo fiddler James Morrison, recorded in the 1920s, unobtrusively preserved in the archive's 78s store, is enough to fire the imagination of the casual visitor. The past might be another country, as LP Hartley suggested, but the Irish Traditional Music Archive will ensure that we can begin to understand it, and possibly even borrow something from it.

"The future is all about beefing up access," says Carolan. "This might be digitally - for material that's out of copyright, through publications like the Goodman collection, broadcasting, web access and the business of sound publishing. We plan to publish sound field recordings on a representational basis in the future too, having dipped our toe in the water with our Eddie Butcher recording recently."

Twenty per cent of the Irish Traditional Music Archive's users are non-Irish - mostly Europeans and Americans with an interest in Irish music. "In the 19 years of the archive's existence, Irish music has become much more of an international genre. We've found increasing interest coming from Asian players, and from people interested in all kinds of Celtic fusion."

The science of archiving is central to Carolan's vision of ITMA. He refuses to be drawn on the question of whether he personally enjoys all aspects of the multi-headed beast that is traditional music these days. "As an archivist, you're a kind of scientist, documenting what happens. You're not saying what should be. We don't value one thing above another, when acquiring material, so if say, 10 CDs are published this week, we would acquire all 10. We try to be neutral and scientific. If a thing qualifies as Irish traditional music, it's in, and if you're not sure, it's in too. Better to have it in than out."

The Irish Traditional Music Archive celebrates the official opening of its new premises at 73 Merrion Square today. www.itma.ie