The 'Anoraks Ireland' Digitisation Project

[Dec A Wash]

From Radiowaves:



'Anoraks Ireland' was a one-stop resource for Irish radio enthusiasts of the 1980s and early 1990s allowing them to buy or swap cassette recordings, and other materials, relating to the hundreds of pirate radio stations that existed back then. The organisation extensively documented the unique golden era of pirate radio in the form of photographs, magazines, detailed bandscans, station surveys and much more.



Earlier this year 'Anoraks Ireland' founder Paul Davidson agreed to donate his vast collection of Irish radio materials to the Irish Pirate Radio Archive at DCU.



The materials, primarily from the pirate radio era of the 80s, offer a fascinating insight into the Irish broadcasting landscape of the time and consist of thousands of cassette recordings; photos of DJs, studios & transmitter sites; advertising rate cards; newspaper cuttings along with lots of other materials.



The Irish Pirate Radio Archive, ably assisted by the teams at Pirate.ie and Radiowaves.fm, are in the process of digitising the huge collection and are about to start archiving it across the three websites. We all look forward to making this invaluable collection available to historians, students and visitors to our websites.



The digitisation teams are:

Eddie Bohan @ The Irish Pirate Radio Archive

https://ibhof.blogspot.com/

Brian Greene & John Walsh @ www.Pirate.ie

John Fleming @ www.Radiowaves.fm



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This is a simulpost announcement from the three aforementioned sites, with each choosing a different recording to showcase what is available.



We've chosen to run the final hours and minutes of ENERGY 103, with the last ever live programme on the station presented by Pat Courtenay; and also the final 30 minutes of non-stop music before a fader consigned the station to the history books.

You can listen to this here:

Energy 103 March 11th 1988 » Radiowaves.FM
http://radiowaves.fm/ire/blog/1988/03/1 ... 11th-1988/
This is a recording of the historical final moments of one of the better Dublin stations from the golden age of pirate radio. Energy 103's unannounced closure came in two stages - first the final live show, which was presented by Pat Courtenay, with Teena Gates on News, both of whom appeared oblivious to the fact that the station was about to shut down. The part-airchecked recording runs from 5pm-7pm.When Pat finished his show, the usual 7pm News bulletin was missing and uninterrupted music (bar the odd promo) followed. In the second recording below, we return to the output at around 8.20pm and run through to the sad end when Energy 103 was consigned to the history books.


The Irish Pirate Radio Archive have chosen a recording of a Galway station, KANDY RADIO, from December 1987.

Listen here:-

Mixcloud



And Pirate.ie have gone with a recording of the Cork station RADIO ERI which can be listened to here:-


The Anoraks Ireland Digitisation Project - Irish Pirate Radio Audio Archive
https://pirate.ie/archive/the-anoraks-i ... n-project/
Anoraks Ireland was a one-stop resource for Irish radio enthusiasts of the 1980s and early 1990s allowing them to buy or swap cassette recordings and other materials relating to the hundreds of pirate radio stations that existed back then. The organisation extensively documented the unique golden era of pirate radio in the form of photographs, … Continue reading "The Anoraks Ireland Digitisation Project"


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Tagged: anoraksirelandarchives

[kadman]

Hopefully it does not get consigned to some dark dingy underground storage like the vast amount of items in Irish museums that are destined to never see the light of day again. Its amazing that we dont have the staff to ensure that valuable historical items never make it further than aisle 3 shelf 4 in some storage area.
I would have thought thats what the lotto funding was for, instead of funding the GAA, and greyhound and horse racing projects.

[Del.Monte]

On a similar theme, there are now three full scale transport museums in Northern Ireland - four if you include what's left of the Foyle Valley Railway in Derry - and we have a hayshed on the former Howth Castle Demesne but shure aren't we great we have the GAA museum at Croke Park.

[kadman]

On a similar theme, there are now three full scale transport museums in Northern Ireland - four if you include what's left of the Foyle Valley Railway in Derry - and we have a hayshed on the former Howth Castle Demesne but shure aren't we great we have the GAA museum at Croke Park.

Have we anything of value in the hayshed apart from hay.

No doubt the gaa got funding from the lotto for their museum.

[Del.Monte]

There's a great deal of value in the Howth museum and scattered around the four corners of Ireland. While I personally loathe the GAA, you cannot blame them for working the system and it's the useless stuffed suits in the government like Catherine Martin and the fools in Failte Ireland, the National Heritage Council (National Public Body of the Year - whatever the fxxxx that means) https://www.heritagecouncil.ie/ga/news/ ... -year-2021 that I blame.

[CelticRambler]

Hopefully it does not get consigned to some dark dingy underground storage like the vast amount of items in Irish museums that are destined to never see the light of day again. Its amazing that we dont have the staff to ensure that valuable historical items never make it further than aisle 3 shelf 4 in some storage area.

That's not just an Irish problem, to be fair - there's a massive amount of historical material languishing in unlit caverns around the world, including in countries where you might imagine they'd have their act together:

[Dec A Wash]

We are danger in of losing sight of the theme of this thread!

[CelticRambler]

True enough.

When I saw the comment about the "thousands of cassette recordings" I couldn't help wondering how many of them are/were/will be still in a usable condition. I've been very sad to see my own collection become less and less recoverable, either because the tape/recording has degraded, or because my cassette players are successively becoming unusable/unreliable. Was it Del.Monte who recently suffered the oh-so-familiar tape chewing incident? I know the pros will have had better storage facilities ... at the time, but now? And it's still magnetic tape, subject to all kinds of ambient electromagnetic radiation that didn't exist at the time.