ILAM/Mellon Cataloguing and Digitizing Project

ILAM was awarded a grant from the Andrew P. Mellon Foundation in March 2008 to fund a three year project to run from May 2008 through April 2011. This project is designed to accomplish the following:

• 1. Catalogue and properly preserve ILAM's print holdings according to international archival and library standards. This will include the books, journals and ephemera in the ILAM library and all of the miscellaneous documents from Hugh Tracey's career, such as his field-trip diaries, correspondence, lecture notes and radio show scripts.
• 2. Index, catalogue and digitize the Andrew Tracey Collection of field recordings (reels, cassettes and films/video recordings) of various types of mbira music primarily from Zimbabwe and Chopi Xylophone music from Mozambique.
• 3. Index, catalogue and digitize the Dave Dargie collection of field recordings (reels, cassettes, and video recordings) of Xhosa and Zulu vocal music and various types of mouth bow music from South Africa, indigenized Catholic church music, marimba composition workshop music and miscellaneous other music from South Africa and Namibia.

Andrew Tracey and Laina Gumboreshumba indexing Tracey's field recordings

The ILAM/Mellon Project will be staffed by a fully qualified sound engineer and a trained sound engineering assistant. They will carry out the cataloguing and digital conversion of the two field recording collections mentioned above. The digital sound files along with the metadata captured for each item will be transferred to the ILAM server where access from the ILAM On-line Sound Archive will be possible.

Hugh Tracey's newpaper clippings scrapbook.

A qualified Archivist/Librarian assisted by a meta-data capturer/cataloguing assistant will be responsible for processing the print holdings. The catalogue of ILAM's print holdings will be stored on the Cory Library Millenium Server, which will afford on-line access through a link from the ILAM website to the Rhodes University Website on-line library database (OPAC).

The project commenced on November 1, 2008 with Ms. Chantel Clack serving as archivist and project supervision being provided by the Cory Library Head Archivist, Mrs. Shirley Kabwato.

Last Modified: Thu, 07 Mar 2024 16:32:07 SAST