Heritage Week 2022. Posters from the ITMA Collection

ITMA was delighted to hear in April 2022 that it had been awarded a Community Heritage Grant from the Heritage Council for its project “Physical to Digital: A Complete Scanning Solution for the Irish Traditional Music Archive.” This funding has enabled ITMA to purchase a state-of-the-art specialised large format archival scanning system. Presented below is a collection of LP covers which have been digitised for Heritage Week 2022 using this new scanner.
The scanner which was manufactured by I2S a French company who specialise in image capture and processing is A2 in size. This machine enables ITMA to scan a range of large-format materials which we have been unable to do in-house in the past. Materials like large-sized sheet music, posters, LP covers, a wide range of manuscripts, printed books, periodicals and images. This specialised equipment will future-proof the safe in-house digitisation of all this material for many years to come.

Watch the behind-the-scenes video which documents the installation of this new state-of-the-art scanning system and read our Heritage Week blog here.

Heritage Week 2022 – ITMA Scanner – YouTube

ITMA Poster Collection

The Irish Traditional Music Archive has 1000s of posters in its collection.

The humble poster still catches the attention in spite of the increasing use of electronic advertising media in Irish traditional music, and it brings to public notice festivals, summer and winter schools, concerts, recitals, dances and classes, and a whole variety of publications. The effect of posters has been noticeably enhanced in modern times by increasing local expertise in graphic design and computerised printing, and they are likely to continue to decorate shop windows and pub walls far into the future.

The poster has a secondary, archival value: it serves as a record of events and the places in which they take place, the performers who appear at them, the groups in which they appear, the instruments they play, and a range of other information, from prices to other advertising techniques. Often the poster remains as the only record of a musical event and the people who participated in it. For these reasons, the Irish Traditional Music Archive has always actively collected posters (along with flyers, programmes, and other advertising material). (Nicholas Carolan, 1 April 2010)

Presented below are a selection of Irish music posters from three different sources in the ITMA collection. The first is a collection of posters donated to ITMA recently by Paddy Glackin. The posters mainly focus on Dublin based events in the 1970s and 1980s in venues such as Trinity College and Liberty Hall. The second selection of posters is from the Tomás Ó Canainn collection which was donated to ITMA by his family in 2020. These posters date from the 1970s and feature the Cork group Na Filí which Tomás founded in the late 1960s with fiddler Matt Cranitch and whistle player Tom Barry. Finally a selection of poster from ITMA’s collection is also featured below.