Paper short abstract:

Folklore archives are defined by folklorists and by communities that they serve, study, collect and provide for. This complexity presents both strength and challenge, poses critical questions, but also grants powerful responsibility to shape cultural heritage that will be available in the future.

Paper long abstract:

Interdisciplinarity of folklore studies has a huge impact on the way folklore archives organize and manage records. Materials collected by folklorists in the process of ethnographic fieldwork contain not only text, even in its broadest sense, but necessarily context of cultural phenomena and processes. On one hand, folklorists' research interests define multi-format, multi-dimensional collections they create and deposit to folklore archives. On the other hand, folklore archives are shaped by the community who donate materials striving to preserve their cultural heritage and represent particular ethnic or cultural group in a desired way. Moreover, community comprise givers, users and research subjects of the folklore archives, which inevitably creates complex relationships; raises numerous cultural, ethical, identity questions that surround archival folklore material, its management and representation. These questions are not only extremely important today; they define what cultural heritage will be available for our successors tomorrow.

I will discuss these questions on the example of the Ukrainian Folklore Archives. Being part of the research centre at the University of Alberta, at the same time, it exists to a great extent due to generosity of Ukrainian Canadian community. As folklore archivists, we are constantly juggling our interest in the study of cultural expressions with the community's desire to preserve old and authentic traditions, with the struggles of North American academia with regard to the arts education, with our own search for identity as we position folklore archives within broader archival community, being advocates of folklore archives even within our own discipline of folkloristics.