At Folkmusikens hus we archive recordings of, chiefly, folk music from our region Dalarna. In most cases there are no copyrights attached to our music recordings, so all we need for publishing is the approval of the musicians. We are using our net of contacts with the folk music community to find and get consent for publishing our recordings on the internet. This also has the added benefit that our audience gets to decide what should be available. We have developed a model for going about this work.
Initially our collection consisted solely of material that we had digitized from established institutions. During our existence we have also gladly accepted donations and loans from the folk music community. In this way we have expanded our archive, and the initial recordings presently only comprise about a quarter of our holdings. Now it gives a more holistic image of what was actually played around the homes of musicians, and not only what the institutions have asked for. Our database has grown out of this background, and allows for structured and precise queries, avoiding many of the false positives we would have gotten with a “Google-type” search. The found set can be listened to, directly from the database, without us having to chop up the media file into little bits to fit the data record. Instead we have registered the time information in the database and the media is played between the time stamps only.
