Congratualtions to Mr. Nicholas Carolan and all the staff at the Irish Traditional Music Archive which recently received an Award of Excellence from the International Association of Music Libraries (UK & Ireland).
The Award celebrates institutional and individual excellence, and acknowledges ‘activity in music libraries which demonstrates sustained good work and good practice with the potential to be adopted and adapted by others’. It is presented every two years. The nominations for this year’s awards were judged by a panel of experts from both the music and library worlds, chaired by Professor Jan Smaczny of Queen’s University, Belfast.
ITMA is the only Irish institutional award winner of the year, and it was joined on the day by British libraries which included the British Library Music Collections, the Library of Cardiff University, the Library of the Royal Northern College of Music, and the Library of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
In its observations on ITMA, the judging panel said that its service was ‘particularly commended for the very wide-ranging collection which is of national and international significance, its contribution to Europeana, the sizeable staff with broad and appropriate skills, the collection’s open accessibility which is clearly widely regarded as a model for such repositories, and the strong and attractive website’
For further information, see http://www.iaml.info/iaml-uk-irl/news/excellence_2014.pdf and www.itma.ie, or contact ITMA at +353-(0)1-6619699.