Archivio Vi.Vo.

The audiovisual heritage of the twentieth century is at risk of being lost. The risk also applies to digital material. The obsolescence of hardware and software for storing and managing such material and the rapid obsolescence of representation formats prevent data from being transmitted. Forward-looking and careful planning can minimise its repercussions on memory preservation. The knowledge conveyed by oral culture may be as widespread and accessible as written resources, by contrasting the process of technological obsolescence.

The Tuscany Region decided to support Archivio Vi.Vo., a project to develop a model for:

• preserving audio and audiovisual documentation;
• safeguarding its contents through digital «re-mediation»;
• making audiovisual digital resources accessible and fully usable;
• creating educational paths for schools and for the Tuscan museums;
• involving, also through social channels, the vast audience of the region;
• taking into account the international standards in the field;
• establishing - through the study of «prototypical» cases - a work chain for audio-video archives and a model to deal with issues of recovery, archiving, management and dissemination.

The ILC4CLARIN Italian node offers archiving preservation access and tools for linguistic data of a written type. Archivio Vi.Vo. aims at constituting a pilot study within CLARIN-IT to experiment methods and offer services to disciplines interested in oral sources. Within Archivio Vi.Vo. the ILC4CLARIN repository will be improved through an experimental approach to the conservation, management and access to audio and audio-video data and metadata. The experimental activity will aim to adopt the model and the high-performance computing and archiving services of the new GARR network infrastructure, built along the CLOUD paradigm.

Caterina Bueno (1943–2007) was an Italian ethnomusicologist and singer. Her work as a researcher has been highly appreciated for its cultural value, as it allowed the collection of many folk songs of Tuscany and central Italy. She started travelling through the Tuscan countryside and villages recording Tuscan peasants, artisans, common men and women singing any kind of folk song: lullabies, ottave (rhyming stanzas sung during improvised contrasts between poets), stornelli (monostrophic songs), narrative songs, social and political songs, and much more.

Caterina Bueno’s sound archive is composed of 476 carriers (audio reels and compact cassettes), corresponding to nearly 714 hours of recording and was digitised during the PAR-FAS project Gra.fo (Grammo-foni. Le soffitte della voce, UNISI & SNS, http://sns.grafo.it). It was located at two different owners: part of it was stored at Caterina’s heirs’ house, while the rest was kept by the former Culture Counsellor of the Municipality of San Marcello Pistoiese, in the Montagna Pistoiese, where a multi-media library was supposed to be set up. Split over two parties, the archive is fragmented and inaccessible to the community. It is worth to have the entire archive reassembled in the digital domain, in the respect of the artist’s wishes. The archive is organized along the following categories:

• field-research (investigations carried out in the Tuscan countryside from the late '50s to the end of the artist’s life);
• live performances (recordings of concerts and events);
• performances’ rehearsals (recordings of rehearsals with musicians).

The Archivio Vi.Vo. model will be applied to preservation of Caterina Bueno’s sound archive, which contains the sound recordings collected by the artist throughout her life. In 2010, her family deposited Caterina Bueno’s archive containing articles, letters, notes, drawings, photographs, research materials at the Archivio di Stato of Florence. The material has been catalogued (Giorgi et al. 2014), but the archive is «silent»: it does not allow to hear the voice of Caterina and her informants. Archivio Vi.vo will fill the gap between Caterina Bueno’s papers and her voice.

Archivio Vi.Vo. & CLARIN-IT will develop a model which can be replicated on other audiovisual archives, even outside the context of Tuscany. This model will be disseminated both to the scientific community interested in accessing these data, and to the general public who enjoy ethnomusical materials produced in the territory.

• Università degli Studi di Siena
• Soprintendenza Archivistica e Bibliografica della Toscana
• ILC-CNR & CLARIN-IT
• Unione dei Comuni del Casentino

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