Our Mission
The Centre for Ethnomusicology is an archive and a research resource that houses a collection of more than 4000 titles in audio and video recordings from local and international communities, as well as a diverse instrument collection. In addition to the instruments and recordings, the Centre offers access to research findings and written documentation. These collections are catalogued on our database (called MULTI-MIMSY) that allows easy access by key word search. All of our recordings can be listened to on-site at our media listening stations. These recordings cannot be borrowed, but, when permitted by the contributors, copies can be dubbed for the cost of the materials.
The Centre provides a resource for those seeking to understand how people use music to connect, express, and create community and identity, and is of value to students and faculty in the social sciences, humanities, education, and fine arts.
As a research facility, the Centre continues to investigate, collect, document, and preserve a comprehensive sampling of the music as well as ideas of value, utility, function, and expression among diverse communities and individuals as they are articulated and lived through and around music making. This documentation will become part of the growing collection of the Canadian Centre for Ethnomusicology, thereby becoming available for analysis and dialogue through the established channels of scholarly discourse as well as through programmes and events presented to the larger community under the auspices of the Centre. Another aspect of the Centre's work is to transcend the immediate product of data and analysis in order to access how groups and communities represent themselves to both themselves and to other groups and communities or to the "larger society." Assuming culturally appropriate perspectives through participation and partnership, the aim is to understand how culturally conditioned modes of perception, thought, and communication are transmitted both through music and in the social context in which the music is cultivated.
folkwaysAlive! Initiative
In 1985 the University of Alberta acquired the Moses and Frances Asch Collection of Folkways Recordings. This vast collection includes more than 2000 LPs with recordings spanning the world of music and sound. As of fall 2004 the Folkways collection will be housed in the Centre for Ethnomusicology, and will be available as an important resource for researchers, musicians, and educators.
The Centre for Ethnomusicology has played a central role in the collaborative Folkways Alive! Initiative through digitizing the collection. Centre volunteers have uploaded the entire Folkways collection of over 2000 albums to their server and by the end of the summer will have, in addition, digitized and uploaded all of the accompanying covers and liner notes from the original LPs. The end result of this project is that the entire Folkways collection, and eventually all Centre collections will be available on a local server accessible from listening machines with search capabilities to be housed in the Centre. Another aspect of this endeavor is the MuDoc project run by a team including the Centre staff, Computing Science colleagues, and student volunteers. MuDoc is newly designed software for working with folk music collections in a web-based interface; it will make the Folkways collection available locally, and eventually allow the rest of the Centre collections to be available on the internet. In addition, internet users will be able to submit comments, new ethnographic information, and new collections of sound, visuals, and documentation, which after peer review, can be added to the system and made available on the internet.
