Open Source Folklore Archivesана Disseminating Small Memory

 Open Source Folklore Archives ­ Disseminating Small Memory Boxes
Liviu Pop The Institute "Folklore Archive" of the Romanian Academy Abstract: The article has two parts: the first one is a general presentation of The Institute "Folklore Archive" of the Romanian Academy from Cluj­Napoca and the current digitization project and the second one is a possible solution for long term digital preservation of the content from the archive. This solution can be viewed from several organic perspectives: on of the zoo, one of the seed­bank and, finally, the guerrilla gardening perspective. The first one insists on the importance of returning into the wild what was once captured on the field of research, the second one is about the seed­bank as a live database for future generations and the last one offers a way of adopting the seed bombing method to the problem of disappearing immaterial cultural heritage. This article is trying to describe a conceptual model, rather than technical details of achieving it. Keywords: open source folklore archive, cultural heritage, digital archives, intangible culture, Romanian folklore The history of the "Folklore Archive" of the Romanian Academy 1
The Institute "Folklore Archive" of the Romanian Academy Cluj­Napoca (IAFCJ) is the oldest research institute of the Romanian Academy, founded in Cluj, in 1930, by Ion Mușlea (1899­1966). It contains one of the biggest research archives of Romanian folklore, dwarfed only by the mammoth archive of the 2
Institute of Ethnography and Folklore „Constantin Brăiloiu” from Bucharest (IEF) , also part of the Romanian Academy. Apart from those two folklore archives, the Romanian Academy has another one in 3
Iași, The Folklore Archive of Moldova and Bucovina (AFMB) . Those three archives are covering, more or less, the three historical regions of Romania: IAFCJ covers mainly Transylvania, although records from other regions can be found as well, IEF covers all of Romania, not merely Valachia, while AMFB contains mainly records from Moldova. The history of IAFCJ can be split into four different periods that we call the golden age (1930­1948), the rupture (1949­1964), the communist era (1964­1989) and the contemporary revival (1990 to present times). The golden age of the archive. 1930­1948 The Folklore Archive was the first of its kind in Romania. Although there was another initiative to gather the customs and traditions of the rural communities at the Transylvanian Museum of Ethnography, the responses received to a series of questionnaires failed to be properly curated and the documents remained underutilized. Ion Mușlea, who started working for the museum was frustrated with the situation and he decided to take action. Starting 1930 he spread all over Transylvania his 14 questionnaires and 5 queries in order to obtain a radiography of the traditional culture of Romania. Although the Archive started in 1930, The official webpage is available at http://folkarchivecluj.ro/_/, visited on 14 October 2014. The official webpage is available at http://www.academiaromana.ro/ief/default.htm, visited on 14 October 2014. 3
The official webpage is available at http://www.philippide.ro/pages/etnografie.html, visited on 14 October 2014. 1
2
1/9 older documents can be found as well, part of the donations received from different intellectuals of the time who manifested an interest in this field. The main body of the archive from that period is constituted by the answers received from the professors 4
and priests that were teaching in villages. Many of the 1221 manuscripts contain handwritten descriptions of specific customs from different celebrations (religious moments throughout the year, the gathering of crops) or information related to rituals (weddings and funerals), but also descriptions of children games or different superstitions. Sometimes the written descriptions are illustrated with naive drawings and in some cases the respondents added a picture or two to the correspondence. Being the oldest and one of the most detailed researches conducted, this corpus of archive is considered to be the most valuable. It is deeply influenced and connected to the personality of Ion Mușlea, the founder of the archive. Ion Mușlea managed to continue his work for over ten years, but after the start of the Second World War, the activity of the archive dwindled. The manuscript notebooks were exiled to Sibiu when Transylvania was under the Hungarian occupation during the war and after the war they were hosted in the building of the University’s Library, where Mușlea was acting as director. The situation became worse when the new political regime reconfigured the institution of the Romanian Academy. Mușlea was demoted from his role of director of the Folklore Archive to a simple researcher and his research campaign stopped. In this period Mușlea and his assistant managed to put together a dedicated folklore library and they also edited an Annual Journal dedicated to folklore and ethnography research. This Journal was sent to many similar institutions from all over Europe in exchange for books or journals of the same type. Mușlea also undertook the task of maintaining up to date the bibliography containing the latest publications on folklore and related issues from Romania. Although he had only one assistant during this period, he managed to leave behind an immense legacy that is highly appreciated even today. More details about this first period 5
can be found in the volume that depicts from a personal point of view those times . It is worth to notice also a donation from 1973 containing around 4400 pictures that were taken by Tache Papahagi between 1921­1940. The pictures caught details of the rural live from all over Romania. The rupture. 1949­1964. The period corresponds to the period following the reform of the Romanian Academy into the Academy of the People Republic of Romania. This new institution eliminated most of the old members of the Academy and accepted new members based on political affinities, not on scientific merits. The Institute "Folklore Archive" of the Romanian Academy has a wide variety of records from that period. There is a wax cylinder collection containing 542 cylinders. Romanian and Hungarian songs were recorded during the period of 1949­1954, mainly from Transylvania. From 1951 the magnetic tapes were also used for audio recordings, but many documents containing both folk literature or folk music were handwritten directly on 6
the field. The Literary Additional Fond and the Musical Additional Fond contain around 25.000 documents and around 18.000 documents, mainly from this period. Most of the Hungarian, German and Rroma folklore currently available in the archive was gathered during those years as part of the activity of 4
The Catalogue of this collection can be found at http://folkarchivecluj.ro/IAFCJ_Catalog_Fondul_Muslea.xls, visited on 14 October 2014. 5
Ion Mușlea, Arhiva de Folclor a Academiei Române. Studii, memorii ale întemeierii, rapoarte de activitate, chestionare 1930­1948, Ediţie critică, note, cronologie, comentarii şi bibliografie de Ion Cuceu şi Maria Cuceu, Cluj­Napoca, Editura Fundației pentru Studii Europene, 2003, available at http://folkarchivecluj.ro/_/wp­content/uploads/2014/01/Arhiva_de_Folclor_Ioan_Muslea_web.pdf, visited on 14 October 2014. 6
The catalogue is avasilable at http://folkarchivecluj.ro/_/wp­content/uploads/2014/01/catalog_FAL_corectat.xls, visited on 14 October 2014. 2/9 The Institute for Studies of the Minorities. It was a fertile period for field research. The main difference between the previous period is that this time the records were taken by professionals, by researchers trained in University for folklore and music. The quality of the records is more uniform than the ones received from the villages. Also, having newer technology, mainly magnetic tapes, at hand helped in the process of gathering the immaterial culture. Thus, over two thirds and all the magnetic tapes and all the wax cylinders were recorded in this period. A series of photos were taken during this time and the Institute still holds a vast collection of negatives and a collection of approximately 2100 ethnographic information cards. Those are A5 size pieces of hard paper containing a 9 / 13 centimeters picture and additional information about the content of the picture. Although a lot of work was done during this period, there was little to no continuity with the previous one. Only later the legacy of Ion Mușlea was fully recovered. The communist times. 1964­1989. After 1964 the situation entered into a more stable phase. Under the management of Dumitru Pop, Ion Taloș and, later, Ion Cuceu, the archive focused on developing its functional dimension. During this period, the focus was placed on structuring the archive. Although some finding aids were created previously, mainly the cards for each song recorded on the wax cylinder and on the magnetic tapes and from those general catalogues were compiled, the effort was to detail the content of the documents from the archive. Over 300.000 information cards were created in this period, mainly for creating the indexes. Those are the Index for folk lyrics, the Index of the villages ­ containing an alphabetical arrangement of the places from where the records were taken, the Index of genres and species ­ a classification based on the type of song or literature form, the Dictionary of Romanian sayings ­ a real pen and paper database containing over 70.000 items compiled not only from records from the archive, but from all the publications related to the Romanian folklore. Apart from the indexes, the transcriptions of the audio material took place. The music was transcribed on paper, the same happened to the folklore literature. Later, part of the folklore literature was typewritten. In total it is estimated that the archive contains over 750.000 items, taking into consideration that a document can contain multiple items. The contemporary revival. 1989 to present. After the Romanian Revolution the Archive became an independent institute, part of the Romanian Academy. Although the gathering campaigns were drastically reduced, due to the low funding of the newly established institution, the research output was of great importance, the Institute "Folklore Archive" of the Romanian Academy becoming after a while acknowledged as an institution of excellence. For a few years the Annual Journal was published again, continuing the tradition from the “golden age”. Slowly, but steadily, the computers were introduced in the researchers arsenal, although not always with best results. One of the researchers, Almási István, saw his one year long project vanish in front of his eyes due to a mistake made by the programmer with whom he was collaborating. An Apple II was received as a donation during the early 1990s, but the responsible with it was instructing the researchers to be extra careful with the handling of the computer. Due to those two incidents and to a general view that the computers were mainly useful for hard sciences and math, the researchers were not in a haste to embrace the new technologies. One of the recent change was the acquisition of equipment for digitizing not only the magnetic tapes, which were in danger of being demagnetized and the content lost, but also scanners for obtaining digital copies of 3/9 the pictures and paper documents from the archive. Due to the dedication and hard­work of the students 7
from the Music Academy “Gheorghe Dima” and the volunteers from the Orthodox Seminary from 8
Cluj­Napoca , 85% of the Literary Additional Fond is scanned and 50% of the Musical Additional Fond. Also around 50% of the magnetic tapes were digitized. This is an important first step in creating a trusted long term digital repository. Planing a Long Term Open Source Folklore Archive The content of the folklore archive has a number of particularities that are raising a number of issues, but also opening a variety of opportunities. To begin with, the records from the Archive have multiple authors. First there is the actor or the informant, the person who sings or tells a story to the researcher. Not once, there are several persons performing a song. But the songs or the story they are interpreting and is being recorded is not their own, it is part of a collective heritage and nobody can claim the ownership. Then you have the researcher who went in the village and recorded the folklore piece. He is not there in a purely personal endeavor, but part of a research project initiated and planned by an institution. After recording the folklore pieces, the researcher returns to the institution and introduces the material in the archive. Later, the material can be used for elaborating a scientific publication, either by the researcher or by somebody else. To determine who, in what percentage and for how long has the copyright is quite a challenge that is still to be taken. Especially in Romania’s case, this decision is quite complex, as it can be seen in the schema 9
available on the outofcopyright.eu site . It is of great importance if the records from a folklore archive can be made publicly accessible not only from a cultural heritage point of view, but also from a personal and emotional point of view. We can approach the role of the archive from a zoo perspective. During a certain time, some researchers went into the “wild” and gathered certain “folklore species” from their “natural environment” ­ the traditional villages. Many of the informants left behind very few traces of their existence, and even fewer were kept in a public institution. It might even happen that they were the last ones to know a particular song or story. Once that folklore piece was “captured” / recorded on tape or paper, its survival is assured for an indefinite time. It seems only fair to “repopulate” the former natural habitat with long gone folklore species in case of need. Sending the records from the archive back to the places from where they were taken might be a gesture of courtesy, but the emotional impact on the informants or their offsprings can be surprising. There is another reason why it is worth sending back to the original places the records from the archive. Planing a long term digital repository is a hit and miss process. Although we are aware of the OAIS model
10
and we are trying to guide by it in planing the digital repository, the fact is that the digital archive needs active and constant care, unlike its analogue ancestor. The paper or the magnetic tape managed to preserve the content without necessarily paying to much attention to it. If the conditions for storing the documents were proper, a check from time to time, sometimes over years, was quite enough. But the digital versions of the same content need to be checked for integrity regularly, there must be several backup copy kept in different locations, the files need to be transformed from master copies to access ones, after a while they must be migrated, converted or even emulated when there is no other solution, and in the end the digital copies will become obsolete anyhow due to newer, better, higher quality technical standards that will become available. Official webpage http://www.amgd.ro, visited on 14 October 2014. Official webpage http://www.stocluj.ro, visited on 14 October 2014. 9
Christina Angelopoulos, Bogdan Manolea, Decision tree for Romania to answer the question whether a certain work or other subject matter vested with copyright or neighbouring rights has fallen into the public domain., available at http://outofcopyright.eu/research/Romania.pdf, visited on 14 October 2014. 10
Reference Model For An Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Recommended Practice Ccsds 650.0­M­2, available at http://public.ccsds.org/publications/archive/650x0m2.pdf, visited on 14 October 2014. 7
8
4/9 The solution could be to rely not only on the perfect curation of the digital archive, but also on creating a network of communities that have direct access to partial or full copies of the archive. In my opinion having direct access to documents of ancestors or valuable cultural heritage will present a high interest among inhabitants from rural areas. This can be done not only by creating an website and offering them access to the items uploaded there, but by placing, in a public space, a physical object that has a particular significance for their collective memory and that allows direct interaction. Those objects can be called 11
Small Memory Boxes and we can imagine them being a Mini PC (like a NUC or a Raspberry PI enabled storage system) that could act either as miniservers and/or kiosks. Adding a router might enable the youngsters of the community to access the archive via WiFi with their mobile or laptops, while the older generations could interact directly with the archive via the kiosk. The software that would allow both of those function is Omeka, “a free, flexible, and open source web­publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions. Its «five­minute setup» makes 12
launching an online exhibition as easy as launching a blog.“ Even more, it might be possible to create specific mini FM radio stations, that could broadcast, on a limited area, audio materials from the archive playing in loop. The lower we can push the technology barrier, the greater the accessibility increases for the members of the community. 11
Next Unit of Computing, more details available at http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/overview.html, visited on 14 October 2014. 12
About Omeka, available at http://omeka.org/about/, visited on 14 October 2014. 5/9 Seed Cathedral ­ UK Pavilion ­ Shanghai 2010 Expo 6/9 One could also view the archive as a seed bank. The seed banks are a contemporary effort to preserve the biodiversity of plants, due to the danger that many species might become totally eradicated from their natural habitat. This is especially urgent as “today, 60,000 to 100,000 species of plant are faced with the 13
threat of extinction.” There are several such initiatives, the most well known being the Norwegian 14
15
Svalbard Global Seed Vault and the Millennium Seed Bank Project by the Kew Royal Botanical 16
Gardens . Both endeavours have a long term approach to the issue of preserving valuable seeds as an effort to ignite, in case of emergency, future biodiversity in different parts of the world. This long term approach is what interests us the most as an example of correct mind­frame for planing long term preservation of immaterial culture. Although a vault at the Arctic Circle seems to be an ideal solution even for a digital archive, in the case of the folklore archive the seeds need to be planted now, hoping that they will bloom, make flowers, grow seeds and reproduce for many generations. Giving the communities access to the seeds is the most important step. Seed Cathedral ­ UK Pavilion ­ Shanghai 2010 Expo 13
About the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership, available at http://www.kew.org/science­conservation/millennium­seed­bank­partnership/about­millennium­seed­bank­partne
rship, visited on 14 October 2014. 14
Arctic Seed Vault Opens Doors for 100 Million Seeds available at http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/lmd/campain/svalbard­global­seed­vault/news/arctic­seed­vault­opens­doors­fo
r­100­mi.html?id=501721, visited on 14 October 2014. 15
Maria Popova, The Story of the Millennium Seed Bank Project + Gorgeous Vintage Seed Catalog Cover Artwork, available at http://www.brainpickings.org/2011/09/22/the­last­great­plant­hunt­millennium­seed­bank­project/, visited on 14 October 2014. 16
Collecting seeds to save plants, available at http://www.kew.org/science­conservation/millennium­seed­bank/collecting, visited on 14 October 2014. 7/9 The way the small memory boxes (SMB) will be spread across rural areas resembles a seed bombing 17
campaign. Seed bombing is a guerrilla gardening approach to revitalize patches of dirt from the cities where nothing grows. Various seeds are mixed with soil and fertilizer and made into small balls. After they dry, they can be taken on a trip along the city and thrown in different places, in hope that something will grow. Sometimes this happens, sometimes it doesn’t, depending on the circumstances. We can expect to have similar results with the spreading of SMBs in rural areas: some will be used by the members of the community, some will remain untouched. Thus, an imperfect, unequal, approximate copy of the archive will emerge, an alive archive, that will modify itself according to the people interacting with it. This might be viewed more alongside the lines of an artistic attempt to create an open source folklore archive, than a technical attempt to have a backup of the digital version of the archive. Whether these small memory boxes will be implemented and how is to be seen, however we firmly believe that a folklore infusion with items from the archive could bring new life and hope for the warn out villages of old Transylvania. Alternative live archive. 17
Seed Bombs ­ A guide to their various forms and functions, available at http://www.guerrillagardening.org/ggseedbombs.html, visited on 14 October 2014. 8/9 References: The official webpage of The Institute "Folklore Archive" of the Romanian Academy from Cluj­Napoca: http://folkarchivecluj.ro/_/ The official webpage of the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore „Constantin Brăiloiu” from Bucharest: http://www.academiaromana.ro/ief/default.htm, The official webpage of The Folklore Archive of Moldova and Bucovina http://www.philippide.ro/pages/etnografie.html The Catalogue of Ion Mușlea Collection from the Institute "Folklore Archive" of the Romanian Academy http://folkarchivecluj.ro/IAFCJ_Catalog_Fondul_Muslea.xls Ion Mușlea, Arhiva de Folclor a Academiei Române. Studii, memorii ale întemeierii, rapoarte de activitate, chestionare 1930­1948, Ediţie critică, note, cronologie, comentarii şi bibliografie de Ion Cuceu şi Maria Cuceu, Cluj­Napoca, Editura Fundației pentru Studii Europene, 2003, available at http://folkarchivecluj.ro/_/wp­content/uploads/2014/01/Arhiva_de_Folclor_Ioan_Muslea_web.pdf, The Catalogue of Literary Additional Fond of The Institute "Folklore Archive" of the Romanian Academy http://folkarchivecluj.ro/_/wp­content/uploads/2014/01/catalog_FAL_corectat.xls Public domain calculator http://outofcopyright.eu Reference Model For An Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Recommended Practice Ccsds 650.0­M­2, available at http://public.ccsds.org/publications/archive/650x0m2.pdf Next Unit of Computing (NUC) ­ http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/overview.html Omeka http://omeka.org/ The Millennium Seed Bank Partnership, http://www.kew.org/science­conservation/millennium­seed­bank­partnership/, Arctic Seed Vault, www.seedvault.no Maria Popova, The Story of the Millennium Seed Bank Project + Gorgeous Vintage Seed Catalog Cover Artwork, http://www.brainpickings.org/2011/09/22/the­last­great­plant­hunt­millennium­seed­bank­project/ Seed Bombs ­ A guide to their various forms and functions, http://www.guerrillagardening.org/ggseedbombs.html 9/9