Towards a Scottish traditional music archive

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Edinburgh conference hears ideas for a Scottish trad music online portal

A yellow poster with an archive black and white photograph of a music collector with an early sound recording device.

There is a move to create a Scottish Traditional Music Archive, much like ITMA in Dublin – a one-stop shop for accessing and curating traditional music. There was a conference on this topic in June in Edinburgh organised by the Traditional Music Forum, of which FluteFling is a member. I attended online and the report from TMF head Dave Francis on the day’s proceedings is now available online for everyone to access.

There were many good speakers and for me the important realisation that the archive in Scotland is very different from Ireland, where numerous resources are housed near each other in neighbouring institutes in Dublin.

In Scotland, there are important archives dispersed across different locations, for example Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Perth, Dundee, The Isle of Canna and many more, plus some exclusively online, such as Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches and rareTunes.

So much of Scotland is already focused on the central belt as we know and the practicalities and costs of establishing a new centre would be prohibitive. It’s arguably a good thing for the archive to be dispersed and have collections remain where they originate.

Canna House (left) Isle of Canna, run by the National Trust for Scotland. The Canna House Archive is not permitted to leave the island and is housed in temporary containers (centre and right) near the quay while building refurbishment takes place. Photo: (c) Gordon Turnbull

It was actually a stipulation of the Canna House Collection made by Margaret Fay Shaw and John Lorne Campbell (himself a flute player), that it remains on the island. The owners, the National Trust for Scotland, have taken this seriously and when I visited the Isle of Canna briefly earlier in August, refurbishment of the House meant that the archive was stored near the quay in special containers.

So the challenge will be to create an online portal that allows people to be signposted to the relevant resources as well as visiting the physical archives in person.