THE VIRTUAL READING-ROOM
of the Archives of Latvian Folklore
This is a project with a long history. The idea was converted into
reality with the help of State Fund of
Culture Capital and Ministry of
Education and Science.
The currently available form is still a test version, so we expect your
suggestions and noted errors! The system will be improved constantly.
Access to the material
Access is provided via a search engine created by
Normunds Grūzītis. Open the appropriate page (Images or Sound),
choose a value from a drop-down list or enter one in a window.
Results will be shown in the form of a table.
The material
The search is based on the LFK archive data
base. Entering the parametres, you will receive information whether any
material meeting your search criteria is available at LFK.
When you see an active link in the results (like this), it means that the
material (image or sound fragment) is available online. Click on the
link and it will open. You can watch the images in your browser, while
you will need some mp3 player to listen to the sound.
Not all of the archive material is available online. Currently the
technical design is being tested, with this leading to new ideas being
born, but these ideas take time to implement. Second, not all of the
material described in the data base is already digitised, so, please be
patient! Third, some parts of material may be kept private for ethical
reasons.
Of course, there can still be errors in the data, keeping prepared
material from being seen. Therefore ask and enquire about things of
interest for you. Though be prepared that it may take visiting LFK to see that image or listen to that
particular piece!
Types of material
In the course of time not only manuscripts came to LFK.
Originally the only images were drawings,
then the first submitted photos reached LFK,
still later, with the staff members of LFK taking pictures, both
negatives and prints can be found in the archive. (More recently also
images without any hard copy form have been included, but that is a
different story!)
Not all of the negatives
were printed, not all of the archived prints have corresponding
negatives. When the link to the particular item contains a number with
index
"n", it means that the digital image is taken from a negative. While if
the first 4 of the 8
digits in the file name contain something like 1951###, it indicates
that the image was taken in the respective year and it was scanned from
a print in an album (as the practice of arranging prints in such
seems to have been very popular).
If you wish more information on an image, write down that particular
number, when making your enquiry.
The first sound recordings were phonograph cylinders, then reel tape, now
DAT and minidisks, as well as HDD recordings. Phonograph recordings
were used to transcribe melodies, so they all only have an archive
number
indicating the handwritten score (and thus in fact being an
identification numer of different type of material). Recordings onto tape,
made between 1951 and 1979, were numbered, thus facilitating their
identification for digitising purposes. With this being the case, tape
recordings were chosen to be the first material included on this search
list. There is also a significant
collection of VHS video, but digitisiation of it is just about to
start,
so it will be added in the future. Be patient!
Language
This search is based on our internal register data base,
which is in Latvian. We apologise to readers whose Latvian
skills are insufficient in order to read these texts as the
task of translating the whole material into English to make the textual
information easier available is beyond our capabilities. We can only
suggest you to use the online Latvian - English dictionary from Tilde or contact us
Search Pages
Images
Sound