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Part of Documentation and Information in Ethnological Sciences in Poland / LUD 1995 t.79
- extracted text
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Lud,
BRONISŁAWA
vol. 79, 1995
KOPCZYŃSKA-JAWORSKA
Centre
of Ethnographic
Polish
Ethnological
Documentation
and
Information
Society
Łódź
DOCUMENTATION
Introductory
AND INFORMATION
IN
SCIENCES IN POLAND
ETHNOLOGICAL
Remarks
Scientific information is an integral part of all scholarly activities. In this
paper - in agreement with mainstream nomenclature - by the concept of
scholarly information we mean collecting resource data and scientific records,
their documentary processing, searching and information as well as the
reproduction and distribution of material records (cf. Skalski 1976, p. 81 - 86).
This is why for the last several of years, the term "documentation" has often
been removed from the name of many institutions founded to gather records
and information, on the grounds that it is implied by a wider concept
- "information". For example, the name of Ośrodek Dokumentacji i Informacji Naukowej Polskiej Akademii Nauk [Center of Scientific Documentation
and Information of Polish Academy of Sciences] (ODIN PAN) was changed
into Centrum Informacji Naukowej PAN [Center of Scientific Information of
PAN]. Ośrodek Dokumenta~ji i Informacji Etnograficznej Polskiego Towarzystwa Ludoznawczego [Center of Ethnographic Documentation
and Information of the Polish Ethnological Society] has retained its original name,
which was also maintained in many centers abroad.
The documentation-information
activity, whose aim in the first place is to
help the researchers or any other users of the data to most effectively spend
their time, should be adjusted both to the current and future needs of this
discipline. To this effect, this activity should be programmed and realized in
connection with the intended scientific and practical goals of the institution
that it is supposed to serve. At the same time the form and method of
transferring information should be adopted to the varying and changing needs
of particular users (Poradnik ... , 1977, pp. 9 - 10).
One of the conditions of achieving the above goals is to improve the
circulation of information within one discipline and to and from the related
discipline, both on a local and international scale. This implies improvement of
the systems of documentation and development of maximally effective search
systems.
88
Ethnological
Data
Ethnology, like other anthropological
sciences as well as his tory and
sociology, deals with the activities of humans and the cultures they create.
Sources providing information about humans are so diverse that it is difficult
to fit them into rigid schemes. As M. Bloch said: "Everything man speaks and
writes about, produces or touches may or should disclose something about
him" (Bloch, 1962, p. 90). As far as the past activities of man, we trace them, i.e.
following the signs visible to our senses that were left behind by phenomena
not perceptible at present (Kula, 1968, p. 46). Those traces are written records
or material artifacts. When they are located underneath the ground and are
studied using excavation methods, they are called archaeological sources. By
analogy to the way of isolation of archaeological sources, which constitutes
a research method, in literature we can also find some references to "an
ethnographic source". In these references it is always stressed that ethnographic
sources derived from field studies - as such research is often referred to in
ethnographic practice - are "collected" in the outfield, or - as the specialists
in social sciences say - they are sources "created" by the researcher, or sources
that are "invoked" (recordings of interviews, behavioral observations, or
descriptions of the effects of human creative activities). As "invoked", they may
be opposed to sources that are "found" that dominate in the work of
a historian. To a certain degree, this opposition - which has recently been
much emphasized in heuristic considerations - is apparent, for although the
invoked sources may inform us more how researchers perceive or estimate
certain phenomena and how they are going to respond to them, yet
information is always reselected by a researcher inspired by his/her experience
and affected by specific problems of the discipline he/she represents. Thus, the
subject of scholarship is its product (Baudouin de Courtenay, 1923, p. 26) and
a result of the dialogue between the researcher and the object of research.
Although ethnographic materials supplied as a result of the field studies are
undoubtedly characteristic of ethnology, yet ethnology, particularly that
dealing with the development of some realms of culture - as other sciences
concerned with the history of culture - employs all possible sources which
disclose human activity. They actually become a source, or - as the
contemporary anthropology likes to put it - a text of culture - when they are
disclosed. In the language of scholarly documentation they are called "primary
documents".
Primary
Documents
and Their Archiving
Primary materials, which are the source of ethnographic scientific analyses,
and are collected by ethnographers and managed by academic ethnological
89
institutions, comprise records of observations, written records or recordings of
interviews made by researchers, responses - given by respondents or
questioners - to sets of questions in questionnaires, recordings of folklore
texts, music, and songs, or products and human behavior fixed on photographs
or film. In the whole group of scientific sources of particular importance are
museum collections and library collections commonly used in scientific work.
While for museum collections, mainly due to their measurable material
value, a certain ways of storing their holdings has been developed, and the
documentation that accompanied them is now systematically archivized, the
fundamental base of sources of ethnological works - recordings of interviews
and observations - became the object of work of documentalists only after
World War n. Until then these materials, collected during guided interviews
mainly with inhabitants of the country, or observation notes were mostly kept
in a private notebook of a researcher and were inaccessible till the moment of
publication. Indeed, already before the World War II it was believed to be
necessary to found folk studies archives, analogous to folklore archives, which
had been established in countries such as Estonia and Finland (Zawistowicz,
1933). However, it was only due to the havoc brought by the war and
development of the methodology of ethnographic studies (cf. KopczyńskaJaworska, 1971, pp. 201 - 215) as well as the fact that the results of field studies
organized by institutions ceased to be the property of researchers, that archives
of research materials were set up in most ethnographic research institutions.
Unfortunately, so far no uniform and obligatory principles of archivizing the
collected research documentation has been specified. The only exception are
museums where new arrivals are documented in a similar way (inventory files),
yet purchase cards in each museum are different. Likewise, these is no
standardized form of photographic and drawing documentation, done both in
the field and on the spot, in the museum. Some of the information aquired in the
filed is introduced onto the inventory file during the purchase process or some
supplementary investigations, and some of it is used when preparing exhibitions.
Only in few museums are the museum employees required to turn over detailed
notes of descriptive materials to the archive. The situation is much better in the
institutes of ethnology which - in most cases - keep the inquiries of
investigation in their archives, yet the cataloging methods are diverse and, as
a result, the number of archive items does not reflect the actual size of particular
collections. Moreover, in these institutions there is no uniform search system. In
general, most institutions develop their own cataloging systems, and as a result
any user in order to make use of the collection spends a great deal of time finding
and learning the rules applied in this particular scientific institution 1.
l For
the description of the manner of archivizing collections see: Blaszczyk, Karpińska,
Kopczyńska-Jaworska,
Zakrzewska, 1979, pp. 235 - 241.
90
Because of such a diversity, distribution, and multitude of scientific
institutions, the importance of centers informing about all scientific studies and
collecting and preparing
derivative materials is expanding (Kopczyńska-Jaworska, Królikowska, 1971). To meet the needs of specific categories of
recipients, different information services have been organized and corresponding forms and methods of work have been adopted. In spite of such
a differentiation of the services involved in the process, it is possible to
distinguish three main operations: collection, processing, and transfer/distribution of information contained in documents (cf. Dembowska, 1965, pp.
30 - 31).
Foundation of the Center of Ethnographic Documentation and Information of
the Polish Ethnological Society
Since for many years Polish ethnology had not had any central documentation institution, in May of 1968 at the initiative of Prof. K. Zawistowicz-Adamska at the plenary session of the Main Board of the Polish
Ethnological Society in Toruń, a resolution was made to set up a Center of
Ethnographic Documentation
and Information as a division of the Polish
Ethnological Society. The Center had its headquarters in Łódź at the Institute
of Ethnography (now Ethnology) of the University of Łódź. Prof. Kazimiera
Zawistowicz-Adamska was appointed head of the Center2. Her intention was
to set up a documentation
base concerning the scientific, promotion, and
cultural-educational
activity directly or indirectly related to the field of
ethnography (including the subjects of field studies, central and local publications, periodicals); to preserve the evidence of local researchers and
workers, local museum resources; to collect information about special collections: exhibitions, art workshops, small open air museums, museum stations,
articles found in provincial ethnographic archives, representative centers of folk
art, folk dance and song groups, and scientific institutions and researchers home
and abroad. This base would become a source of information for all
ethnographic circles and organizers of cultural and educational activities. The
letter directed to the authorities of the Polish Academy of Sciences that
subsidized the Society read as follows: "we believe that the Center of
Ethnographic Documentation and Information initiated within the statutory
activity of the Polish Ethnological Society, will be of help in setting up a central
archive of the future Institute of Ethnography and Folk Studies". As we know,
such an institute has never been founded, in spite of many year after year efforts.
The Center started to operate in the fall of 1968, in the beginning subsidized
by the Polish Academy of Sciences. This subsidy was supplied for two more
2
Since the mid -
1971 this function has been taken over by B. Kopczyńska-Jaworska.
91
years, and then from 1970 to 1979 its activities were included in the statutory
activity of the Society, while later, in the years t 979 - 1989, some of the activities
of the Center were financed by the Committee of Ethnological Sciences of PAN
(Polish Academy of Sciences). When PAN ceased to provide funds for scientific
societies, i.e. since 1982, the activities of the Center have been financed by the
Society from funds derived from other sources and from research grants
allocated twice a year by the Committee of Scientific Studies (KBN).
At the moment of its foundation, the Center commissioned one person,
while since 1970 it has had one full-time position, occupied either by one or
two persons (each having a part-time job). Depending on the financial
condition of the Center, several more people were employed on commisions
(the position of the Manager was always unpaid). In the first period, the
number of staff often changed 3, to stabilize only in the mid of the seventies
when first Ms. G. Ewa Karpińska M.A., then Iwona Wiktor-Grzelakowska
M.A. and Maria Niewiadomska M.A. were employed. The last of the three has
been working at the institute ever since. In September 1986, after defending her
doctoral thesis Ms. Karpińska went to work at the University, and in 1989 Ms.
Grzelakowska left the Center as well. Her position was taken by Jolanta
Kolińska, M.A. who has been working here until now. Of the employees of the
Center, Ms. Elżbieta Królikowska, Iwona Grzelakowska, Maria Niewiadomska all went through an appropriate training in the area of documentation
organized by INTE. The last of them also attended post-doctoral studies in
documentation at the University of Warsaw.
In November of 1977, at the Committee of Ethnological Sciences of the
Polish Academy of Sciences, a special Section for Ethnological Documentation
was established, where the employees of the Center became actively involved 4.
Documentation
of CEDI of the Polish Ethnological Society
The documentation base of the Center contains mainly derivative materials
(also called processed) that either refer to the primary materials or give brief
factual information about them; then it also includes documentation cards that
are similar information cards, sometimes called by documentalists factual index
cards. Most of the documents housed in the Center are arranged in a system of
files, which since 1989 are also available as a computer data bases.
3 Between
1968 - 1976, the Center employed as archivists the following persons: Zofia
Piotrowska, Krystyna Selmowiczowa, Barbara Jurga, while as ethnographers: Elżbieta Królikowska, M.A., Elżbieta Putyńska M.A., and Teresa Kulesza-Zakrzewska.
The staff turnover was
caused, among others, by the fact that for all those who worked in the Center this was their second
job.
4 The Sccretary
of the group was Teresa Zakrzewska, and since 1984 Maria Niewiadomska
M.A.
s The Center uses PC computers
working in INTERNET.
92
Factual files of the Center contain personal and institutional documentation as well as documents concerning folklore activities. Each of the
documentation has a different type of information cards:
l. The personal documentation includes the following files:
a. personal files of ethnographers and persons employed in the area
of ethnography, including members of the Polish Ethnological Society,
b. files of local workers - amateur ethnographers,
c. file of folk artists 6;
2. The file informing about ethnological institutions comprises:
a. the file of Polish ethnographic museums and regional museums
possessing ethnographic collections,
b. the file of Polish and foreign ethnographic institutions along with
the information about people they employ;
3. Files informing about the ethnographic and folklore activity:
a. file of ethnographic exhibitions 7,
b. file of folklore festivals and events.
The source materials for the aforementioned files have been obtained by
briefing regular and specialist newspaper and from questionnaires filled in by
competent institutions and persons. Some information comes from folders and
event programs. In the case of the personal file, another source of materials for
the personal file of ethnographers were the data from the "M.A. program m"
provided by GUS [Chief Statistical Office].
In the course of collecting the data it appeared that it is far beyond the
capacity of the few workers of the Center to process such a large number of
files. Thus, it became necessary to concentrate on those areas which were most
interesting for the recipients. To meet this criterion, in 1973 - at the
suggestion of T. Zakrzewska, M.A. - the work on compiling the files on artists
as well as on folklore festivals and events was discontinued, while in 1990
- due to the cost of distribution of questionnaires the recording of ethnographic exhibitions was also abandoned. Still, however, an attempt has been made
to update the personal file of ethnographers and ethnographic institution in
Poland and abroad 8.
The basic activities of the Center involved collecting information about the
M.A., doctoral, and postdoctoral theses in the field of ethnology conducted at
6 This file, completed
in 1969-1979, contained information about folk artists obtained after
the verification of folk artists conducted by the Ministry of Culture and Art in J 972.
7 The file on exhibitions was kept up to date till 1990 through questionnaires
sent to various
ethnographic institutions. On the basis of answers to the questionnaires, a list was made and then
published in "Lud".
8 In the second half of the 70s, the Center, to the order of the Committee
of Ethnological
Sciences of PAN, prepared an analysis of the employment of graduates of ethnography.
93
the universities and in institutions that belonged to PAN, as well as preparing
reviews of Polish ethnological papers.
In the Center, the aforementioned papers and theses were analyzed. The
outcome of these analyses was publication of Bibliografia etnograficznych prac
magisterskich.
doktorskich
i habilitacyjnych
wykonanych
w latach 1945 -1975
[Bibliography of M.A., Ph.D, and post-doctoral theses written in the years
1945 - 1975] (Kulesza, Zakrzewska, 1979), where the papers were presented in
a chronological order, or with respect to centers, and according to territorial
and factual criteria with no descriptive analysis given. From 1976 to 1987 in
"Lud" a list of M.A. theses, relative to centers where they were written, was
published, while the list of doctoral and post-doctoral theses was supplemented
with a descriptive analysis of the content of each thesis 9.
Another area of activity which required even more work was bibliographic
documentation. Until 1985, bibliography was collected on index cards (documentation cards) containing a bibliographic description and the code of subject
classification. Only some items selected for International
Bibliography
of the
Social Sciences (ed. by UNESCO) and Internationale
Volkskundliche
Bibliographie (ed. by SIEF) were the subject of a descriptive analysis whose result was
noted in the form of descriptors which were to help editors of these
bibliographies in making subject indexes.
On the basis of the index cards, bibliographies - which supplemented the
personal files and the indexes of ethnogeographic names - were prepared for
publication 10.
Since 1989, bibliographic descriptions have been made using a computer
packet of programs MIKRO/ISIS written to the order of UNESCO in 1985.
This program is designed for operating textual data bases. Though in practice
it is not very convenient, UNESCO supplies it to documentation stations free
of charge.
The bibliographic notes not only make the grounds for writing bibliographies in papers intended for publication, but also play the role of a bank of
bibliographic data which can be used on the spot or in the form of prints made
according to the accepted criteria.
In 1994, the Center took the possibilities offered by computer data base
formation, and at the suggestion of the Minister of Culture and Art, began the
task of creating a base whose role would be to inform researches about the
9 This list refers to studies conducted
in years 1976 - 1987, see "Lud" vol. 63, 1979, pp.
415 -420; vol. 64, 1980, pp. 388 - 392; vol. 65, 1981, pp. 401 - 406; vol. 66, 1982, pp. 401 - 411; vol. 68,
1984, pp. 404-414; vol. 72, 1988, pp. 310- 324.
10 In general,
the following current bibliographies were published: Karpińska,
1980;
Niewiadmska, 1982; 1983; 1989 and retrospective bibliographies: Niewiadomska, 1984; Karpińska,
Niewiadomska, 1986; 1988; Hlebowicz, 1993.
94
decreasing number of craftsmen and manufacturers cultivating traditional skills.
Thus, this base provides information about each person, the place he/she lives,
and the field of craftsmanship, conditions of manufacturing, and sale of the
articles. This base - created in cooperation between museum employees and
cultural activists - contains over 4000 names and can be currently updated.
By using the modified ISIS program and owing to the fact that the university
has access to INTERNET it is possible immediatly to send collected data to
the individuals concerned either at the Ministry or in cultural institutions.
A prerequisite for the above is a system of indices that permits fast access to
the desired information.
Information -
Search Language
In order to explore the possibilities alTered by the computer it was
necessary to develop a specific language of information and search commands.
Yet, this task implied numerous problems related to the specific character of
the humanities in general, and in particular, to the advancement of ethnological
methodology.
There is no room here to review the history of ethnology and the series of
changes that the subject of ethnology has undergone. Once attention was
focused on the evolving products of culture, another time on sets of those
artifacts, which formed culture areas. Some researchers were interested not in
the artifacts themselves, but rather in the needs they fulfil1ed and the cultural
reactions they inspired, leading to the foundation of institutions guaranteeing
the continuation
of culture. For other researchers the most important
questions lay in the world of values and their configurations, hierarchy,
developmental processes of cultural models, and their transfer, adaptation,
integration, or rejection. And last, but not least, culture has been also studied
from the viewpoint of language behavior, transfer of definite messages and
reading their meanings, either internal (proper for the studied culture) or
external, which is not always realized and universal. Thus, the general
perspective of interest is once purely culturological, while at other times
- historical or psycho-social in a wide sense of these terms.
Each of these perspectives developed dilTerent methodological assumptions
and introduced specialist terms and changes to the language of description of
basical1y the same cultural reality. Time and again the same, or apparently
synonymous terms indicate dilTerent concepts. It is also a common practice
that in ethnological papers the terminology accepted in sociology, psychology,
or linguistics is used. The applied terms, beside the implied scientific meaning,
have also dilTerent "given" meanings.
Facing the difficulties described above, the Center had to make some
arbitrary decisions when in the 70s it initiated a program aiming at develop-
95
ment of a specialist thesaurus for the needs of ethnography and ethnology. As
a result of heated discussions held by a group of specialist teachers, theoreticians and practitioners, a decision was made to elaborate by order of superior
authority (er. Poletyło, Bielicka, 1972) a dictionary of key words indispensable
in ethnology. The starting point for the project was an analysis of the
ethnographic-folklore
thesaurus prepared by editors of the German journal
"Demos" (Kopczyńska-Jaworska,
Niewiadomska, 1993). To meet the widespread needs of Polish readers and of the Center, in the beginning the work was
focused parallelyon compiling a dictionary of key words concerning the issues
of the fundamentals of existence, types of economy, and technology (the
so-called material culture) and the dictionary of words essential for problems
associated with social organization, ritual behavior, ideology, knowledge and
art (the so-called social and symbolic culture). Completed in 1993, both parts of
the dictionary quite comprehensively cover all issues that are the subject of
interest of ethnology 11. This dictionary, in a photocopied form, is distributed
by Polish Ethnological Society.
This dictionary is not standardized in character. Its main function is to help
in cataloguing and searching for documents; thus its function is more
pragmatic. It is an open set that can be completed if the need arises. In the
Center it is used as a standardized information code in order to quickly and
effectively find information, which guarantees a comprehensive application of
the possessed documentation.
On the basis of this dictionary it would be possible to construct a thesaurus
of ethnological sciences for different domains - to cover all questions related
to our discipline. Such an attempt would be of the highest value yet it would
require a great deal of work and expertise which at present is beyond the
capacity of the employees of the Center.
Other Ethnological and Folklore Documentation
Bases
For the present paper to fully inform about the condition of ethnological
and folklore documentation in Poland, it is necessary to present, at least in
a few words, the bases created outside of the Center of Ethnographic
Documentation and Information of the Polish Ethnological Society.
One of the first, already before 1979, to set up a folklore data base was the
Polish Department (today a Department of Textual Studies and Grammar of
Contemporary Polish of the Polish Institute) of the Maria Curie-Skłodowska
University in Lublin. The Department aimed at collecting texts of folk songs,
11 In lhe Department
of Ethnology of the Łódź University, on the basis of this dictionary,
a dictionary of key words for cataloguing a set of pictures concerning urban environments was
prepared - Karpińska, Niewiadomska, 1993.
96
developing a system of entries, and their generic classification. For those texts,
collected on special files, numerous criss-crossing catalogues based on diverse
criteria concerning the pragmatics and structure of text were prepared using
electronic technology. In the descriptions made using the language of descriptors, all features of texts which in view of the genealogy of folklore might be
considered distinctive, were taken into account, along with other different
features that for many reasons are important for people interested in this type
of folklore. The descriptions made, beside the search function, are also helpful
in a semantic analysis of texts (Bartmiński, 1979). At present, particularly
advanced are the studies on descriptor semantics of carols coming from the
field studies conducted by the Department, as well as carols published by many
publishing houses, including both folk and church and national carols. At
present, the file of carols includes ca. 5000 index cards. Beside serial descriptors
indicating the so-called matrix of the text, there are also pragmatic descriptors
concerning the fields of generic qualification, relation of the text to the situation
in which it was produced, the role of text in the process of folklore
communication (where, among others, the intention implied in the content and
the structure of the text is taken into account), etc. Structural-textual
descriptors describe the subject of the text, the figures present, the sender and
recipient of the text, etc. The catalogue they have developed should also serve
as a practical test for the systematics of works based on a computer-supported
facet-descriptor system. At the present stage of the work advancement of the
catalogue, the computer program permits printing a few draft indices containing standardized incipits, lists of performers, indexes of cities where the folk
carols were noted down, a list of sources where to find a given carol, topic
motifs, and indexes of figures. It is supposed that the final stage of the work will
be compilation of one thesaurus of descriptors (Bartmiński, Drozdowski, 1995).
In 1983, the Department of the Ethnography of Slavs (today's Institute of
Ethnology) of the Jagiellonian University set up a data base PROKES
containing unpublished sources (field interviews, dissertations, photos, drawings, maps) concerning the folk culture of the Polish Carpathian, that are
housed in many research institutions. As the first, articles from the collections
of the Department were subjected to analysis, then most collections of the
Cracow Laboratory of Folk Art Documentation of the Institute of Polish Art
of PAN, and collections of the Ethnographic Museum in Cracow. Collections
of other institutions will be added to the base whenever a possibility arises to
employ appropriate staff members. Since 1983 to 1994, over ł 3 000 sources
were processed.
In the PROKES system, the starting point is an index card of the source
which gives all search categories (localization, the date of origin, author of the
source, topic) along with the description of the content of the source written in
an non-standardized language. Among the search categories, the most impor-
97
tant is the subject catalogue, i.e. a list of topics related to the subject of interest
of ethnography. This catalogue, numerically coded, is very helpful in classifying
and searching for appropriate material. Though it has an open structure, it is
general in character (all ethnographic questions are classified in 19 main
sections and 172 specific subsections) (Duszeńko, Heller, 1988). Practice has
shown [hat the degree of specification of the subject catalogue is time and again
quite insufficient to obtain the required specific information, while the
description of the source content - that is to aid the above - because of the
ambiguity of the terms used does not adequately identify the phenomena of
interest for the recipient. This is what triggered compilation of the hierarchic-subject tables of key-words. Already in print is the first volume of the
dictionary containing such entries as ethos, rituals, demonology, magic,
medicine. For the subsequent volumes the following entries have already been
described: dwelling interior, ethnographic groups, rural and provincial professional groups, system of affinity, economic cooperation.
As it is easy to guess, in this kind of base the second essential search
criterium is the locality. In the first stage of this base formation, a list of 2800
towns was compiled, all considered to be localized on the territory of the
Carpathians. In 1994, another stage of work began, involving historic
characterization of these towns, which would later serve as the basis for making
a list of distinctive features to be additionally introduced to the base. This
information would concern the period when a particular town was founded, its
subsequent administrative, state and church affiliation, and if possible - ethnoregional classification (inf. C. Robotycki).
The difference between the data base of Dzieła wszystkie [Complete Works]
of Oskar Kolberg, that has been created since 1986 in the Editorial Office of
the Polish Ethnological Society and those previously discussed is that its index
refers not only to the place concerned (volume, page) where the desired
information appears, but also provides a printout of this particular fragment of
the text. This is possible, because a complete set of texts (apart from songs and
melodies processed in the described data base in Lublin) has been introduced
to the data base as these texts are treated as "textual data base".
Now, the Editorial Office localized in Poznań is in the course of introducing
into the computer data base of the textual content of Kolberg's works. By the
end of 1994, 34 volumes out of the 67 published ones were introduced using
a specially designed language of texts description SCRIPT-WORK.
The
textual data base contains not only the texts of particular volumes, but also
over 150 different definitions which, for example, code the beginning and end of
the paragraph, page, reference, line, musical scores, or a sentence - so that the
computer might precisely run such operations as sorting and contextual
searching - as well as the whole physical structure of the text for any possible
editorial purposes.
7 -
Lud t. LXXIX
98
Both the data base of songs and folk culture of the Carpathian as well as
the data base of Dzieła wszystkie [Complete Works] of Oskar Kolberg were
initially written using computers (RIAD-32) working on the batch processing
mode, which prevented the run of conversational program due to a lack of
access to any network, and required a specific coding of information available
in the form of print-outs.
Upon gaining the access to the IBM 4381 computer and implementation of
the INTERNET system at the Adam Mickiewicz University, the Editorial
Office of Oskar Kolberg Complete Works had to adjust the data base to a new
equipment and to international norms of textual base formation. So, in 1995
the Editorial Office started to recode and translate the existing data base into
the SGML system (Structural Generalized Markup Language) which is
consistent with the international standard. This work being completed, the
base of Oskar Kolberg's Complete Works will be added to the INTERNET
system.
In the future, provided adequate equipment is available, the Editorial Office
base will be fully multimediacapable
and would record and process texts,
musical scores, and graphics (Przewoźny, 1993).
One of the first to apply personal computers for accumulating data base
was the Institute of the History of Material Culture (today's Institute of
Archaeology and Ethnology) of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 1985 it
started a base of iconographic data of a set of 6120 photographs documenting
the life of a peasant family. This set consists of reproductions of photos sent by
562 persons for a competition announced by an agricultural journal. Besides
the cataloguing information (the specification of the photo) the base comprises
some data related to what is on the photo (e.g. a house, a family photo,
a wedding picture); for the description Fox Base III Plus (Marczak, 1990) was
used. This information permits finding the pictures that are of interest for as
quickly as possible.
All the aforementioned attempts at applying electronic techniques as
auxiliary tools for searching the source materials make Polish ethnologists
familiar with the possibilities, offered by modern technology. Due to economic
reasons, however, a few more years will elapse before we are able to fully use
the multimedia systems; only then will Polish ethnology face the problem of
cultural hypertexts (Lebrave, 1995).
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Translated by Marek Wilczyński