Paper short abstract:

The Rromanó akhepát - the Archives of the Romany nation - aims, also, to provide researchers with adequate clarifications, explanations and translations made by Romany specialists themselves because the main task is to make the Romany ethnology a real tool for the development of the Romany nation.

Paper long abstract:

The Romany ethnology as a part of Romany studies uses empirical works published in the last 200 years in dozens of different languages. The latter fact usually makes it difficult for scholars from different countries, different scientific schools and areas to understand each other. The Romany archives, in addition to the traditional task of collecting and preserving original and derived sources, aims to provide researchers with adequate clarifications, explanations and translations made by Romany specialists themselves, since they are the ones who know and understand the Romany life, psychology, and aspirations not by songs, books, movies, or archival documents. The Rromanó akhepát, i.e. the Archives of the Romany nation, which the author and colleagues run since 2011 in traditional "paper" form and in modern electronic form, already has a certain number of collections which can be used for ethnology research purposes. These materials come from different sources including copies from public and private archives. Among these records there are statistic, linguistic, folklore, literary fiction and poetry, written and oral history. We have photo, video and audio archives, too; and last component of the Rromanó akhepát is the printed media archive: the Romany part includes 95 newspapers/magazines names and 1579 entries, and the non-Romany part has over 5000 articles from 189 sources in 58 countries. Another area of our work is the Romany library which already has over 7 thousand e-records (books, articles, reports, programs, laws, documents, etc.). We hope to web-represent this rich diversity but, however, after the war.