Folk, jazz, etc: The kist of riches is open and ready for a new generation of ethnologists

While dwelling lovingly on those glory days of the 1950s which unearthed such untapped riches of folk song that Henderson famously compared it to “holding a tin can under Niagara”, the half-hour programme rather gave the impression that not much has moved on since the days of collectors staggering under the weight of bulky tape recorders.

In an age of digital technology and internet communications, things have changed immeasurably in the world of folk collecting and archiving. The launch just over a year ago of the Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o riches online archive rendered some 11,500 hours of recorded Gaelic and Lowland songs, tales and reminiscence available, free, to anyone with internet access anywhere in the world. Its digitised treasures are drawn not only from the School of Scottish Studies’ archives, but from those of BBC Scotland and the National Trust for Scotland’s Canna Collection, but it stands supreme as an example of what can be done with contemporary archives – and also of the kind of challenges the school, now part of Edinburgh University’s Department of Celtic and Scottish Studies, faces, 60 years on.

“Tobar an Dualchais is obviously one of the major things that have happened, enabling us to get material back out there,” says Dr Gary West, head of the department, “but it’s not all that’s going on.” His department teaches some 300 students a year, and West emphasises the importance of encouraging them to ask fundamental questions: “How do you study a nation; how does culture work; what is tradition and how does it move forward?”

When the School was set up, “rescue ethnology” was the buzzword, the idea of recording something before it disappears. That’s always been the case, says West, but it’s something different for each generation, and while digitisation has revolutionised folklore studies, it also brings implications about instant accessibility to global culture. “Is the world moving towards some kind of homogenised sameness so far as culture is concerned; will we end up listening to the same music, telling the same stories the world over?

“There may be potential for that, but most cultures, however you define them, put certain barriers up against that. That’s one reason why there is such a flourishing traditional arts scene in Scotland – and also official recognition of it, which there wasn’t before.”

West, 45, wears various hats other than his academic one – he is a much respected piper who has played on the folk scene with groups such as Ceolbeg, and presents BBC Radio Scotland’s weekly Pipeline programme, but he also sits on the board of Creative Scotland, “and they definitely see the traditional arts as something viable and very relevant to 21st-century Scotland. And one of the things that a department like the School or its archive can and should be doing in the 21st century is helping fuel that interest, but also informing it.”

Can tapping into our ancestral voices, as it were, provide a counterbalance to the ubiquity of cultural bombardment through the media, online or otherwise? “I think there’s probably a human need for roots and understanding the cultural traditions of where you come from at whatever level – place, family, community as well as nation,” says West.

Tradition, despite that word’s backward-looking implications, is constantly undergoing change.

When the School was formed the emphasis was on unaccompanied singing in Scots and Gaelic, but since then there have been major instrumental revivals of the clarsach and the bellows-blown pipes. But what are the mechanics and philosophy behind revivals? Further questions, suggests West, with which the 21st-century ethnology student must wrestle.

• For further information, see www.celtscot.ed.ac.uk or www.tobarandualchais.co.uk