The International Library of African Music and Rhodes University are extremely proud of the results that have been achieved so far on two projects to catalogue and digitise ILAM’s invaluable archives of traditional African music.
The projects, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Rand Merchant Bank, are already benefitting the international music and academic community who have already begun to access these archives online.
The International Library of African Music (ILAM) at Rhodes University is a rare and internationally recognized archive of the musical heritage of subSaharan Africa consisting primarily of the large collection of recordings of African music made by ILAM's founder, Hugh Tracey, from the 1930s to the 1970s.
In the course of his field research Tracey amassed an enormous collection of professionally engineered sound recordings and photographs taken on 19 field excursions that took him throughout southern and eastern Africa and the Congo. Present-day archival practice requires that ILAM’s holdings be catalogued and digitized for preservation purposes and to allow scholars and others with an interest access to ILAM’s collections via the internet.
ILAM’s Director, Prof. Diane Thram, was successful in obtaining two major foundation grants in 2008 to achieve the cataloguing and digitizing of ILAM’s collections. In January 2008 the Rand Merchant Bank Expressions Fund awarded ILAM R904,000 to support the costs of a two-year project to accomplish cataloguing and digitising of the 952 reels that make up the Hugh Tracey Collection of original field recordings housed in the ILAM archive.
In March 2008, $250,000 was awarded from the Mellon Foundation to fund a three-year project to run from May 2008 through April 2011.
“Without this funding it would have been impossible to achieve what we have already achieved to date,” said Professor Thram. “These projects are performing exceptionally well with production quotas being met on a weekly basis. Already we have afforded the international community access to the archives that have been digitised to date for a number of purposes, from individual research to choral rearrangement.”
The Mellon Project is designed to accomplish the following:
1) Catalogue and properly preserve ILAM's print holdings according to international archival and library standards;
2) Index, catalogue and digitize the Andrew Tracey Collection of field recordings (reels, cassettes and films/video recordings) 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 and mouth bow music from South Africa and indigenized Catholic church music from South Africa and Namibia.
The ILAM/Mellon Project is staffed by a fully qualified sound engineer and a sound engineering assistant who carry out the cataloguing and digital conversion of the two field recording collections mentioned above. A qualified Archivist/Librarian, a cataloguing assistant and several student assistants are responsible for processing the print holdings.
The catalogue of ILAM's print holdings will afford on-line access through a link from the ILAM website to the Rhodes University Website on-line library database (OPAC).
The Rand Merchant Bank's "Expressions Fund" was established to support projects that preserve and promote cultural heritage in South Africa. Built into the Expressions Fund's mission is its aim to foster creative endeavours that promote arts, culture and heritage as outcomes of the projects it funds.
ILAM’s RMB Project is cataloguing and digitising the collection of 12" pancake reels that comprise Hugh Tracey's original field recordings. It is staffed with a qualified sound engineer, a sound engineer assistant and a cataloguing assistant.
The digitised sound recordings and accompanying meta-data produced by both projects can be accessed from ILAM’s website: www.ilam.ru.ac.za by clicking on ILAM Sound Archive Search. Management support for both projects is being provided by Rhodes University’s Library Management Team.
Collectively the projects employ seven staff members and three student assistants to help with the processing of data and are thus also providing valuable skills training and a source of income.
Work on the RMB Project commenced in February, 2008 and is expected to be complete by November 2009.
An outreach component of this project is the creation of a museum exhibit featuring Hugh Tracey’s legacy for African Music and ILAM’s present work. The exhibit is being designed to travel internationally, but will be premiered at the Origins Centre at Wits University in October 2010.
Picture Caption: Andrew Tracey and Laina Gumboreshumba indexing Tracey's field recordings (ILAM photo)