Научните архиви на Института за изследване на изкуствата: специфики и някои проблеми при въвеждането им в бази данни
The Scientific Archives at the Institute of Art Studies: Specifics and Certain Problems of Entering Them into Databases

Summary/Abstract: This publication features the lecture which opened the now ongoing seminar “Art Studies, Archives and the Internet. History and Perspectives”, set up within the framework of a project entitled “Cultural Heritage in the Archives of the Institute of Art Studies (IAS): An Interactive Map of the Arts in Bulgaria.” The exposition has two parts, the first of which presents the general structure of the IAS archives, which was established in 2016. It is based on the specificities of the different arts included, but also on the different art disciplines (and respectively previous fundraising institutions) that generated these archives, namely “Music”, “Fine Arts”, “Architecture”, “Theater” and “Screen Arts.” The goals and tasks of the project are concerned with 1) the digitalization of various types of analogue media (paper, photo, audio and video materials storing multiple kinds of information in each of the archival sections), and 2) the creation of an Internet accessible database which could present in a sophisticated way the complexity of the scientific archives (as they took shape in the process of scientific work done by researchers at the institutions preceding the IAS). This is why the team consists of scholars from a variety of fields (musicology, ethnomusicology, art history, theatre studies and film studies), as well as archival and IT specialists. The second part of the text outlines (as an instance of potential difficulties for the researchers on the team) some scientific problems related to entering information from the IAS Folk Music Archive into previous databases (Web-Folk.bg from the mid-90s and the internal database from 2007 to 2015). Two main issues have been addressed: 1) the musical folklore regions representation, which (in the future database) would rather conform to the music-related dialect map of Elena Stoin’s study, named “Folk Music Dialects of Bulgaria” (1981); 2) problems of sample systematization with reference to their cultural function. Here it has been suggested that the achievements of ethnomusicologists working at the IAS over the 1990s should be followed. Their views and their possible application in the new database will be presented in a future publication.

• Details
• Contents