Monthly Archives: June 2016

Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies

The foundation supported over several years until 2007 research and online collaboration on the culture and history of the indigenous population groups in Central America – who are today ethnical minorities – until the first European contacts in 1519:

Continue reading Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies

The Medieval Archive of Romania – historical collections of the German and Hungarian minorities

The National Archives of Romania conducted with support from the National Archives of Norway and the EEA Grants the successful initiation of the “Medieval Archive of Romania“. This digital archive aims at digitizing in the next years all collections of medieval materials on the territory of Romania. Included are also several collections belonging to the national minorities like the Transylvanian Saxons and the Hungarians respectively Szekely people. Currently a few thousand images are accessible. The scans are overall performed in good, but not excellent quality; substantial metadata is provided. The user interface is also available in English, Hungarian and German. However the registers are currently only in Romanian, thus making research for foreigners more difficult. The project in total is surely a huge step forward for the digitization of the cultural heritage on the territory of Romania but will need continous funding in order to attain its objectives.

Discussion of the impact of digitizing traditional works of music

An interesting, well researched and still up-to-date article from Dean Bartholomew, first published in 2000 and available on the website of the NGO “Cultural Survival”, shows the possible negative effects caused by digitization for minority heritage. These however can be solved by the buildup of professionally developed digital libraries: Continue reading Discussion of the impact of digitizing traditional works of music

Digitized materials on the Aleutian people

The Museum of the Aleutians in Unalaska/AK and Alaska’s Digital Archives are currently working on freely providing collections of digitized photographies on the ethnical group of the Aleutians:

http://www.aleutians.org/research.html

Due to the comparatively high reception of the culture and history of the Aleutians by Russians as well as Americans, the digitization of “Aleutica” is very promising and will undoubtedly mark an important contribution to increasing publicity for this in many ways unique minority.