Folk in Tuscany: the Caterina Bueno sound archive

Caterina Bueno's sound archive is composed of 476 carriers (audio reels and compact cassettes), corresponding to nearly 714 hours of recording and was digitised during the PAR-FAS project Gra.fo (Grammo-foni. Le soffitte della voce, UNISI & SNS, http://sns.grafo.it). It was located at two different owners': part of it was stored at Caterina's heirs' house, while the rest was kept by the former culture counsellor of the Municipality of San Marcello Pistoiese, in the Montagna Pistoiese, where a multi-media library was supposed to be set up. Unfortunately, disagreements and misunderstandings between the two parties have so far made the archive fragmented and inaccessible to the community. Both owners, independently, have turned to Silvia Calamai for the reassembly of the whole archive in the digital domain, in respect of the artist's wishes. After digitising, the carriers were returned to their owners, who helped in finding an arrangement for the sound archive, which can be divided according to the following categories: field-research (investigations carried out in the Tuscan countryside from the late 50s to the end of the artist's life); live performances (recordings of concerts and events); performances' rehearsals (recordings of rehearsals with musicians). In 2019 Regione Toscana decided to support the project of cataloguing and disseminating Caterina Bueno Archive and the following partners were involved: Università degli Studi di Siena (Silvia Calamai), Soprintendenza Archivistica e Bibliografica della Toscana (Maria Francesca Stamuli), CLARIN-IT (Monica Monachini), and Unione dei comuni del Casentino (Pierangelo Bonazzoli). Archivio Vi.vo will thus constitute a pilot study within CLARIN-IT to experiment methods and offer services to disciplines interested in oral sources. The ILC4CLARIN Italian node offers archiving preservation access and tools for linguistic data of a written type; within Archivio Vi.vo. the repository will be improved through experimental approach to conservation, management and access to audio and audio-video data and metadata. Archivio Vi.Vo. will develop a model which can be replicated on other audio-visual archives, even outside the context of Tuscany. The experimental activity will aim to adopt the model and high-performance computing and archiving services of the new GARR network infrastructure, built along the Cloud paradigm. This model will be disseminated both to the scientific community interested in accessing these data, and to the general public who enjoy ethnomusical materials produced in the territory.