Archiving the Digital RAI Collection of Traditional Folk Culture

Abstract

For twenty years, RAI Teche, the RAI structure of Italian Broadcast that includes all the RAI archives, has been committed to bringing to the attention of an ever-wider public the most representative components of the historical, social, and cultural evolution of our country in its collections.

The activity of recovering and enhancing RAI's audiovisual heritage is taking a fundamental step with the launch of a recovery project devoted specifically to Italian folklore. It is intended to highlight a significant documentary complex of research activity that marks a new era for the study of Italian folk traditions and thus becomes a compulsory passage for any possibility to understand the phenomenon.

From this first step was born the need to create a publication space—a website: http://www.teche.rai.it/archivio-del-folclore-italiano/—that would be a specific reference to a fundamental aspect of Italian cultural identity, and an effective tool for sharing and exchanging funds and resources with other audiovisual archives.