ITMA Online Catalogues
Welcome to ITMA's Online Catalogues
You can now search ITMA's extensive online catalogue, which currently reflects its holding of commercially published materials (sound recordings, printed materials & visual materials) and photographs.
Current ITMA Online Catalogue Project
Phase 1
The first priority of the project is to make basic bibliographical, discographical and visual information in ITMA available to researchers, and thus to answer the elementary question about printed, sound recorded and visual material: 'Is it in the Irish Traditional Music Archive?' All items appearing on this online catalogue are available for consultation within the Archive.
The first tranche of catalogue records was made available on 29 July 2008, the 21st anniversary of the foundation of the Archive. By December 2011 the total number of ITMA brief-format catalogue records available online came to some 55,000. All commercially published sound recordings held are included (cylinders, 78s, SPs, EPs, LPs, cassettes, & CDs), as are all published printed items (books, pamphlets, sheet music, & ballad sheets), and all commercially published video recordings (VHSs & DVDs). Photographs and separate paper images are also covered.
Phase 2
More extensive information (such as the full contents listings of books, sound recordings, images, etc.) is already available online locally to visitors to the Archive, and will be made available remotely as resources can be directed to the project.
About the ITMA Catalogues
To help users find items in the ITMA collections, and the details of information that they contain, an ongoing programme of cataloguing and indexing all items on computer has been in progress since the Archive was established in 1987.
The result is a unique information resource that constitutes the largest existing body of computerised information on Irish traditional music. The catalogue records uniquely respond to the nature of the materials of Irish traditional music and the interests of the users of the materials, but are based on generalist international bibliographic systems such as Universal Decimal Classification, the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (second edition), Marc 21, etc.
All commercial sound recordings (78s, SPs, EPs, LPs, cassettes and CDs), all books, serials, and song and music sheets, and also the Archive's photographic collection, have been catalogued in detail to date, as well as commercial videos and DVDs and a large selection of non-commercial audio and video material in less detail. These items can now be searched fully by visitors using the computers provided in the public rooms.
A thematic index on file cards to over 5,000 traditional Irish dance tunes is also available (but is currently undergoing conservation). For details see Breandán Breathnach, ‘Between the Jigs and Reels’ in Ceol (vol. 5, no 2, March 1982).
