Digitisation of Folklore Archives: A Crisis of Tradition or Its ‘New Life’ on the Internet? The Example of Adolf Dygacz’s Collection

Abstract

The process of digitising archives, a universal trend in the last decade, also concerns music resources, thus offering new functionalities to their users. Its effects can facilitate researchers’ work since digital material is readily available and easy to locate. The questions that remain open concern the status of oral history contained in those audio-visual documents, its value and durability, the current results and possible consequences of making these materials accessible on a mass scale, as well as the effectiveness of multidimensional grassroots initiatives, such as cooperation on building virtual collections of materials. What possibilities open up for the musical folklore archives that are currently being discovered? Can digitisation suddenly make them more valuable in the eyes of the society? In this paper, I attempt to diagnose the problem of musical archive digitisation on the example of the ethnomusicological collection of Adolf Dygacz. I stress the importance of local history, which is a common subject in the humanities and has always been part of folklore studies but was not considered in the light of memory studies until very recently.