Virbius Institute

The Virbius Institute was born out of a unique initiative to professionally document the cultural heritage of traditional societies nearing extinction. The Institute has a creative team, academic quality assurance, and an up-to-date IT background that all work together with an international network of support and relations. Therefore, the Institute denotes an international cooperation with experts from various academic fields, as well as a complex archival and publication system. This relies on state-of-the-art technology and leading experts of specialized fields. The outcome is a system with transparent operations which are easy to plan with, has a fast work pace, and allows for control over the whole process, while giving immediate and concrete results. Based on the experience of the past years spent with international cooperation, it can be confidently stated that the project serves a foundation for new research topics, it inspires experts who work in various fields of culture in the countries involved. It engages new generations of researchers, and reaches a wide audience. All of these together considerably help local, particularly valuable cultural elements to integrate into a wider social fabric even against global cultural processes that otherwise push them to the background.

Fields
The Digital Archive

Digitization, database-building, and online publication are fashionable buzzwords of our times, but the practical realization of such projects attributed presents a number of unanticipated issues. To avoid a replication of the archival problems of analogue collections in the digital domain, one needs to have a thorough understanding of the processes involved in analogue-to-digital data conversion and the possibilities of digital publication. Such knowledge is not only important for researchers, but also for the directors of institutes, as the scientific decisions made in connection with such databases have financial implications. The Virbius Institute presents a system that utilizes state-of-the-art digital technology with custom tailored solutions for the organization and further development of any analogue and digital archive.

Research Support

Today, rapid access to collected material, the organization of data units in the range of ten thousands, the verifiability and visibility of entire collection lines are fundamental research requirements. Establishing the internal connections of vast collections is not possible without digital collection management. Scientific model-creation supported by state-of-the-art digital technologies opens previously unknown horizons in research. Our system’s polyhierarchical organization of descriptive folklore data can be flexibly handled, thus it will always be the nature of the raw material to be processed that defines final meta-data structure.

E-learning Material Development

The digital processing and online publication of the raw material has its benefits in various fields of education besides research. The first step is to ensure accessibility, since such materials previously had only been available for researchers. In the future the platform will be appended with tools that are equally useful for both.

Innovation in the Music Industry

It is a societal requirement that value preservation and transfer should not only occur in a narrow section of culture. Online publications directly influence performance art through artist education and training. The arts treat materials such as the ones made accessible through the Institute’s system and platform as sources of inspiration while latently forming value systems and artistic taste. All of this affects further members of the music industry.
Services
● Fieldwork (on-site film and audio recording)
● Digital archive building
● Collection reconstruction
● Digital post-processing
● Database Building
● Website design
● Research data management platform
● Online publication
● Supplementary educational material development
Partners
The Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Research Center for the Humanities, Institute of Musicology
Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music
The Hungarian Heritage House
Ivan Honchar Museum
Lviv National Musical Academy
Intangible Cultural Heritage in Hungary