The archives had a great day at the Celtic Boutique last weekend. We had a CD and Book sale and made a nice little bit of money to end the year. Our next event will be in February when several events are in the works. Stay tuned as we should have announcements for those events shortly. Meanwhile Irish Fest will be announcing its lineup over December and on December 19th Milwaukee Irish Fest will be hosting a fundraiser for the Wauwatosa Food Pantry with the Irish Folk band  Blarney and Irish Christmas stories by Eamonn O’Neill.

Have a Great Thanksgiving!

Barry Stapleton

July & August 2009 are almost behind us now. Three more festivals including our own. The Come Back to Erin exhibit has been very successful. Lots of great comments.

Dublin Irish Fest was great. Wonderful music and weather. La Crosse was great too although rain threatened often…they managed to get in all 3 days without consequence.
Then we took the exhibit home to Milwaukee! The Archives Gallery was quite busy again this year. We want to thank all the volunteers that helped out with our operation. Besides our exhibit we had 4 volunteers helping out with videotaping at the festival and added another person to collect ephemera. The program where folks can donate 10 Irish Music related items for 2 free tickets to Irish Fest was hugely successful. While of course there are many duplicate items…I would estimate over 100 new items came into our Collections.
We also had a wonderful moment with the presentation of a Plaque from Frederick J. Mahoney who is the Great Great Grandson of Edward Bunting.

In September the Archives take the Come Back to Erin exhibit to Kansas City, Chicago and then to Muskegon, Michigan. Hope to meet lots of new friends at these festivals!

We just returned from the Fort Collins Irish Festival. Had a great time. On the trip it was amazing to see all the new windmills in the west plus many windmill parts being shipped on trucks and trains.

Fort Collins is a great town…we thoroughly enjoyed it…beautiful setting for a festival. Great music and a great exhibit from Parnell’s Irish Cobs of an old Tinker wagon and the Irish Cobs (horses) that pulled the wagons. Ken Hannon had his Irish Surname exhibit and we brought our History of Irish Rock Music to the fest.
Many thanks to John and Beverly Schreck who really put on a great fest! We hope to be back someday.

Next week we’ll be taking our “History of Irish Rock Music” to the Fort Collins Irish Fest in Colorado. Some of you may wonder what led to us getting involved in these larger exhibits. The answer is dissemination. The Archives, like many institutions, has so many great artifacts, recordings and images…that early in the Archives history we decided that while Collecting and preservation was important, Dissemination was even more important and is where other institutions really don’t follow through. So besides in house exhibits, like the Early Irish American Music Parlor pictured here

we also make exhibits for outdoor festivals which is where many of you see us. Our musical heritage is an important part of our culture, it’s a joy to put these exhibits together and utilize our holdings in the Archives. So see you in Fort Collins or some of the other festivals as listed on our website at the following link:
http://www.irishfest.com/archives/newsEvents.php

Welcome to our new Ward Irish Music Archives, WIMA, blog. Because we have so much going on here at WIMA we hope that this blog will be a good way to communicate with those interested in our projects and activities.

One recent event was the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, ARSC, conference which was hosted by the Library of Congress in Washington DC this past weekend.

We had a great time at the conference mingling with many others who have a love for collecting and preserving our “aural” history.

We got to see the new Packard Campus of the Library of Congress in Culpeper, VA. This is the new home of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center (NAVCC), an amazing facility. See link
http://www.loc.gov/avconservation/packard/

We also gave a presentation of the life and times of Morton Downey.

Next week we’re off to the Fort Collins Irish Fest where we’ll be taking our “History of Irish Rock Music” exhibit.

Barry Stapleton