Benjamin Gatling, Associate Professor, English, College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS), is set to receive funding for a project in which he will digitize a significant portion of the archive of the Folklore Fund at the Rudaki Institute of Language and Literature in Dushanbe, Tajikistan.
Gatling aims to train local archive staff in best practices, the preservation of materials, and digitization and metadata creation for the majority of the archive’s holdings, as well as the curation of digitized materials.
The archive’s holdings include bound notebooks, notecards, and loose-leaf papers documenting Soviet folklore collecting expeditions in the Tajik SSR and contiguous Persian-speaking regions from the early 1920s until the present.
Most of the materials in the collection date from between 1953 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The collection is the primary repository for the expressive culture of Tajikistan, and the materials that it includes uniquely preserve the country’s cultural patrimony.
The collection is a key scholarly resource for both local and international researchers because its holdings document historical practices not available in any other repository.
Gatling will receive $67,279 from the Modern Endangered Archives Program at University of California, Los Angeles funding by the Arcadia Foundation for this project. Funding will begin in Dec. 2024 and will end in Dec. 2026.
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