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The FARNE Project

© Stephen William Gray

"FARNE (Folk Archive Resource North East) is an exciting and innovative two year project bringing Northumbrian folk music to people's homes across the world. Material including music manuscripts, songs, photos and sound recordings from collections across North East England will be digitised and made available on the web". Well, that's how FARNE describes itself. How is this exciting project working in practice? I asked Project Officer, Rachel Peacock, how it was progressing:

SG: Rachel, you've been working on the project for just over a year now - half way through. Is the task as big as you first thought? Will two years be enough?

RP: I think really the FARNE project could run for years and years. Theres a tremendous wealth of material available to us for digitisation. Unfortunately, we'll have to make sure that two years is enough though, because that's as much funding as we have! This means that we have had to set ourselves boundaries and are only looking at material which meet certain criteria. We are concentrating on material which is rare or fragile and previously unpublished, and therefore most in need of preservation. But even so, I'm sure we will only get through a fraction of what we could.

SG: Do you see yourself, in any way, as a modern-day preserver and collector of songs - a latter-day Cecil Sharp / Sabine Baring-Gould?

RP: Ha ha! Well, I must admit I hadn't seen that, but it's a flattering thought. Certainly, the work we are doing on FARNE is bringing together a lot of material from disparate locations across the North East of England. The project is very much about improving accessibility to important materials, so that people can use these materials easily today - and its exciting to be doing that in a digital environment, because its still a new arena to be working in.

SG: I know that some of the collections you are working with are from Newcastle University and some from Beamish Museum. What other sources are you using, and what formats does the information come in?

RP: There is a huge range of material, coming from museums, libraries, archives and private collections in the North East. We have broadside songs of all shapes and sizes, some with really beautiful illustrations. These are mainly from the nineteenth century, and give a really fascinating insight into how life has changed in the region. There are songs about industry, war, political discontent, domestic life .... They are fascinating historically as well as musically.

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