Visiting the Folklore Archives

Meri Kytö

Last week, we visited the Acoustic Environments in Change project archive at the Folklore Archives (Tampere University, Finland). Helmi Järviluoma, who led the 2000 project, came to our aid to make sure everything was in the right place. For me (Meri) and Heikki, the material was familiar, but for Anne and Kaj, there are boxes and boxes of materials to get acquainted with.

But what a trove of DATs, MiniDiscs, slide images, handwritten research diaries, sound preference surveys (with kids’ handwriting), all sorts of admin papers, manuscripts, maps, correspondences and brochures! We were all quite overwhelmed. A lot of this has been digitized, and it’s going to help us immensely. There is still a vast amount of material that will need our attention and muscle power at the archive.