Architecture, methods and purpose of the Gra.fo sound archive

Tuscany is a privileged area for working on oral documents, as it abounds with both public and private sound archives, collected in different fields of research by scholars as well as amateurs. The majority of these archives are analog and therefore risk deterioration unless they are transferred to the digital domain. Grammo-foni. Le soffitte della voce (Grafo), a two-year project jointly conducted by Scuola Normale Superiore and the University of Siena (Regione Toscana PAR FAS 2007-13), has undertaken the challenging task of putting together different kinds of expertise and building a digitization and cataloguing system with the aim of creating a regional network for the management of sound archives. With over 2,100 hours of digitized recordings and the incredibly vast range of type of documents (biographies, linguistic questionnaires, folk songs, etc.) and topics covered (history, politics, economy, anthropology, linguistics, folk literature, etc.), the Gra.fo archive is a unique and exemplary accomplishment in the Italian panorama. The web-portal is configured to query the database and the server archive containing the preservation copies and to allow the end user to search all the documents (cataloguing records, .mp3 files, transcriptions and accompanying materials .pdf files) collected in Gra.fo. Two distinct types of search are supported: (i) linguistic area (an interactive map allows the users to click on the area of interest and access the corresponding records), and (ii) content (users can search by topic, genre, type of document, etc.). A huge number of oral texts which have been known, until now, to a very limited number of users is now available to the large public