The Cabinet of Folksongs


The Cabinet of Folksongs or The Cabinet of Dainas is a 160 cm tall, 66 cm wide, and 42 cm deep cabinet, in which all Latvian folksongs collected by Latvian folklorist Krišjānis Barons are stored. The cabinet itself was made in Moscow in 1880 after Barons' draft.
The cabinet has two parts. Both parts have 35 drawers, every drawer has 20 sections, and every section can fit 150–200 pieces of paper which are 3x11 cm long. The cabinet's three large drawers at the bottom store archive materials. The Cabinet of Folksongs houses 268,815 pages with 4-line to 8-line folksongs, similar to how other texts such as riddles and adages have been written down.
After the author's death, the cabinet was kept in a bank vault. It was moved to the Archives of Latvian Folklore in 1941, to the Literature, Folklore, and Art Institute of The Latvian Academy of Sciences in 1946, to the Literature, Folklore, and Art Institute of The University of Latvia in 1998, and to the new building of the National Library of Latvia in 2014. Before the relocation to the National Library and it being placed on public display, the Cabinet of Folksongs was insured for one million euros.
The Cabinet of Folksongs has two copies: one in the Krišjānis Barons Museum and the other in Stankevich manor in Russia, where Barons started working with dainas. In 1998, the contents of the Cabinet began to be digitalized and its contents are completely available online since 2006.
In 2001, The Cabinet of Folksongs was included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.