The creation of a multimedia archive of music from the oral tradition: exchanging experiences

The Intercultural Institute of Comparative Music Studies (IISMC) has recently created its own multimedia and sound archive to contain documents gathered in over thirty years’ teaching activities plus new sound and audio-visual collections of popular music from the Triveneto (Northeast Italy), but also from outside Europe. To mark the creation
of the new archive, the IISMC is holding an international conference entitled: “The creation of multimedia archive of music from the oral tradition: exchanging experiences”.
The conference has been organised by Francesco Giannattasio and Giovanni Giuriati, who have invited representatives from leading European oral tradition sound archives. The conference aims to survey the main issues for a multimedia
sound archive of oral tradition documents today: from documentation to cataloguing, digitisation, conservation, the promotion of new research, and access protocols for consulting material (including the Internet). Over the two days various experts will exchange views and experiences of working in institutions such as the Phonogramm Archiv in the Ethnological Museum, Berlin, the Phonogrammarchiv of the Vienna Academy of Sciences, the National Sound Archive of the British Library, London, the Visarkiv, Stockholm, the Italian State Record Library and the Ethnomusicological
Archive of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. They will also assess the experience of some European projects involving co-ordinating sound archive activities.