ILAM Dig

The ILAM sound archive includes Hugh Tracey's recordings from 1929 onwards, which includes recordings from all of his 19 field excursions throughout sub-Saharan Africa. The field collections of Profs. Andrew Tracey (primarily from Zimbabwe and Mozambique) and David Dargie (Xhosa music of South Africa) are also deposited in the archive, which is currently in the process of being digitised. The ‘ilam.dig' project was begun in 1999-2000 through donations from NORAD (the Norwegian aid agency), Norsk Rikskrings Kasting (NRK, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation) and MMINO (the South African NGO funded by Norway), and carried forward in 2001 with a grant from the Smithsonian Institute, Global Sound web site project. Lack of funding halted the digitising project in 2004-2005, but with funding from SA LOTTO digitsing of the pancake reels from Hugh Tracey's original field recordings resumed early in 2006. In February 2007 cataloging and digitising of the thousands of early acetate, shellac and vinyl test pressings and commercial 78rpm recordings produced during Hugh Tracey's career began, funded through the South African National Research Foundation funded DISA/SAMAP (Digital Imaging South Africa/ South Africa Music Archive Project (see Current Projects). Sound clips of thousands of individual songs with attached meta-data files can be accessed on the DISA website.

NORWAY

The Norwegian Ambassador in South Africa, Per Grimstad, was the moving spirit behind several initiatives which NORAD took in South Africa in the field of music and community radio. A group of Norwegians made a preliminary tour in Nov. 1997 to identify projects. When they came to ILAM they were impressed by the historical and cultural value of the ILAM archive and the importance of digitising it for the future. Additional factors in favour of their support were that the project would be self-contained, financially controlled under the Rhodes University accounting system; it would release many hundreds if not thousands of recordings for public access which have been locked away for decades on old recording media such acetate, shellac and vinyl discs, ¼" tape since 1948, and cassette.

TRIP TO THE ARCTIC CIRCLE

Andrew Tracey, director, and Jean-Pierre Fouche, librarian, went to Norway to discuss the implementation of the three parts of the project: digitisation, cataloguing and distribution of sound on the internet. They also went far north in Norway to the Arctic Circle, where we had been invited to visit the archive branch of the Norwegian National Library at Mo i Rana. The archive is inside a mountain, where the temperature remains a constant 8 degrees C throughout the year, although the outside temperature when we were there was minus 36! The mountain stronghold is very damp, but this is controlled by large machinery with back-up power. Only a few technicians work in the mountain; the rest of the staff of some 300 work in a modern building nearby.
MOUNTAIN ARCHIVE

MOUNTAIN ARCHIVE

The National Library agreed to store in their mountain archive one of the three sets of copies of the ILAM sound archive; sound and metadata files being created through the current ILAM/SAMAP project are being stored on the DISA server and the server that ILAM has acquired for this purpose.