From Tobar an Dualchais:
Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches is today announcing a special fundraising campaign to support our ongoing work to develop online access to some of Scotland’s most important audio archives.
Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches is a landmark project to digitize, catalogue and make available online thousands of hours of folklore and folklife recordings made in Scotland over the past century. Most of these recordings come from the Sound Archive of the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh, which contains a wealth of traditional songs, music, tales, poetry, oral history and information on a range of traditional customs and beliefs, from weather lore to second sight, and much more.
Already an invaluable cultural and linguistic resource, Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches contains a great deal of material in Scots, English, and Gaelic, including many hundreds of recordings made in the Hebrides by John Lorne Campbell of Canna (1906–1996), starting in the 1930s. Our archives are also an important documentary source of information on the enormous social and economic changes that occurred in 20th century Scotland, with ordinary people across the country describing the last days of centuries-old working practices and the corresponding effects on their communities.
Although our website now contains many thousands of such tracks, several thousand more hours of recordings from the School of Scottish Studies Archives and Canna Collection are still waiting to be catalogued and added to the site. To help us achieve this goal we are inviting members of the public to donate to our new crowdfunding campaign, hosted by Sponsume at http://www.sponsume.com/project/tobar-dualchais , and running until the 15 December 2013.
Donors can choose from a range of fantastic rewards, including limited song releases from our recent Gaelic and Scots Artists in Residence, traditional musicians Julie Fowlis and Chris Wright, short-courses at the Sabhal Mòr Ostaig college on Skye, and Lifetime Membership of the Traditional Music and Song Association of Scotland.
For more information on Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches and our new fundraising campaign, please contact Mairead MacDonald (Director) on 01471 888 600 / md2.smo@uhi.ac.uk, or Chris Wright (Crowdfunding Campaign Manager) on chris.wright@ed.ac.uk.