The Warsaw-based National Fryderyk Chopin Institute said the deposit will be placed in the Arctic World Archive in Longyearbyen, a facility sometimes nicknamed the "End of the World Library" because it is designed to preserve vital records for centuries in the Arctic’s naturally stable conditions.
Thursday’s handover ceremony will include other depositors and representatives of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).
A Chopin recital by pianist Krzysztof Wierciński is also planned.
Krzysztof Wierciński. Photo: Tytus Żmijewski/PAP
Marcin Konik, head of the institute’s scientific information department, said the deposit marks a step toward safeguarding cultural heritage through digitization and long-term preservation.
“Poland will join the group of countries that comprehensively secure their cultural heritage through digitization and then long-term archiving,” he said.
The archive, launched in 2017, stores data deep underground in a decommissioned mine, close to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the world’s best-known backup store for plant seeds.
The Svalbard Treaty of 1920 designates the archipelago as demilitarized territory, which backers of the archive cite as an added layer of security.
Konik said the archive’s role is growing “especially in the face of current geopolitical turbulence,” as more cultural institutions and other organizations seek offsite backups to protect against worst-case loss.
Longyearbyen, the world's northernmost settlement on Spitsbergen Island in Norway's Svalbard archipelago. Photo: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
This will be the institute’s second deposit at the Arctic World Archive.
In 2024, it placed one data carrier containing digital copies of selected Chopin music manuscripts from the Fryderyk Chopin Museum in Warsaw, alongside Polish deposits including works by Nobel Prize-winning authors Wisława Szymborska and Olga Tokarczuk.
This time, the institute will deposit nine carriers containing the remaining digital copies of Chopin manuscripts, as well as the composer’s correspondence. The originals are held at the Fryderyk Chopin Museum.
The deposit will also include results from an institute-led European Union project to digitize and provide open access to selected Polish music heritage, including manuscripts and printed music from Polish libraries, archives and museums.
Materials come from institutions including the Warsaw Music Society, the Archive of the Wawel Cathedral Chapter, the Czartoryski Museum in the southern city of Kraków, and the Gdańsk Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences on the Baltic coast.
The files are being stored on piqlFilm, an optical film medium designed for long-term archiving.
The institute describes it as an advanced form of microfilm that stores data in both digital and human-readable visual formats, aiming to keep records accessible even if today’s technologies become obsolete.
(rt/gs)
Source: dzieje.pl