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DRI Announces Winner of 2023 Community Archive Scheme: Dublin Digital Radio

02 December 2022

The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) is delighted to announce the winners of the DRI Community Archive Scheme 2023 - Dublin Digital Radio (ddr). They are the ninth community group to win the award since DRI first ran the scheme in 2019. 

About the DRI Community Archive Scheme

As a publicly funded repository for Ireland’s social and cultural data, DRI believes it is important to make long-term preservation of digital materials open to a wide range of organisations, including those operating on a non-funded, voluntary basis. We value the publication of a diversity of datasets and collections and are committed to supporting community-based archival initiatives through sharing our digital preservation skills and profession-based knowledge. We, therefore, offer some associate memberships and all the related benefits, as part of our annual Community Archive Scheme for the length of time it takes a group to add their collection to the Repository.

About Dublin Digital Radio

Dublin Digital Radio (ddr) is an award-winning, online community radio station representing a wealth of alternative music, art and politics across Ireland. We are wholly funded by our members, composed of listeners and broadcasters alike, ensuring that it remains independent of corporate influence and is run democratically by its growing community. Founded in 2016, the station has grown significantly all thanks to the dedication of our volunteers and members.

ddr aims to provide a radical alternative to established media, a station supported by and for its community. ddr’s programming reflects this aim, having run radio events in support of International Women’s DayPride (Queering the Airwaves); while hosting participatory youth programs in: DabbledooYoung ddr and Atomic. ddr is an avid supporter of experimental and left-of-field music and creatives, supporting local scenes directly through our events and programming. We aim to open up new space for sound art, radio art, new music and contemporary electronic music emerging from Ireland. We aim to nurture an ecosystem of experimentalism and participative arts making while building a diverse audience of listeners from throughout Ireland and further afield. ddr wishes to empower its members to use radio as a tool for collective collaboration and cooperation, horizontal skill share and support. The station holds monthly Open Studio events as an introduction to radio making, contributing to this collaborative culture.

DRI Director Natalie Harrower welcomed Dublin Digital Radio saying:

We are delighted to award this year’s Community Archive Scheme to Dublin Digital Radio. Every year the Community Archive Scheme gives us an opportunity to engage with new types of collections and organisations and this is equally true of the winners of 2023’s Community Archive Scheme. This will be our first collection from a radio station. Community-generated radio material is at risk of loss for a variety of reasons and this makes it very important that we are preserving the programmes that ddr have selected for archiving. We look forward to working with ddr and learning from them through this process.

Seán Finan Editor at ddr said:

Dublin Digital Radio is thrilled to be awarded the DRI’s Community Archive Scheme 2023. We applied for the scheme as over the past six years of broadcasting we have amassed a rich archive of radio shows, innovative sound art, radio plays as well as recordings of our annual music festival Alternating Current. We wanted to ensure a selection of this work was preserved within the DRI’s archive as it is already an invaluable resource for researchers and anyone else who is curious about the practices of community groups within Ireland. To win this award ensures that future generations will be able to get a glimpse into radio and sound cultures that were occurring in Ireland at a particular moment.

Commenting on the image to accompany the news story, Seán said:

This image is a poster, designed by Emma Conway, for our Fringe event in 2020. The title of the event was “An Avant Gard Public Service Broadcaster.” The idea behind the event was to build a prototype for a new model of public service broadcasting, one that spoke more concretely to an increasingly digitally native publics. The prototype was developed through a workshop in The Irish Georgian Society held in August 2020. The event itself took the form of a creative symposium within The Irish Georgian Society, with panel discussions from artists, radio makers, journalists and media researchers, as well as featuring a specifically created soundtrack from The Department of Energy. As the concept of the show was built on the idea of this prototype being found in a future archive, it is fitting that it has found a home in the DRI.

You can listen to ddr through their website. Their archive is also available through the ddr website.For more information about the DRI Community Archive Scheme, please visit our dedicated web page: https://www.dri.ie/dri-community-archive-scheme If you are interested in making a future application to the scheme email DRI Membership Manager Lisa Griffith: members@dri.ie 

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