Irish Traditional Music Archive

The Irish Traditional Music Archive (or ITMA; Irish: Taisce Cheol Dúchais Éireann), operating as a charity,[1] is a "national reference archive and resource centre for the traditional song, instrumental music and dance of Ireland".

[citation needed] The archive, described by some sources as the "largest collection of its kind in the world",[3] contains thousands of sound recordings, as well as books and serials, photographs, sheet music, DVDs, posters and catalogues.

[3] Nicholas Carolan, who first found a space for the archive in the Temple Bar area of Dublin,[6] served as director for 28 years until he was succeeded by Grace Toland in 2015.

[6][7] The archive has published two major printed publications deriving from historical manuscript collections of Irish traditional music: Tunes of the Munster Pipers: Irish Traditional Music from the James Goodman Manuscripts, 500 pre-Famine melodies edited by Dr Hugh Shields from a Trinity College Dublin collection; and The Irish Music Manuscripts of Edward Bunting (1773–1843): An Introduction and Catalogue by Dr Colette Moloney, a guide to 1,000 18th- and early 19th-century melodies and 500 song texts held in Queen's University Belfast.

[8] In 2011, ITMA released a biography of Butcher, with 67 previously unpublished songs and an accompanying boxset of three CDs.