Anna Szakál, researcher at the Department of Folklore Studies of the Institute of Ethnology of the HUN-REN Research Center for the Humanities, studies the early period of collecting Transylvanian folk poetry (1830s–1860s): the networks of intellectuals taking part in it, the daily life of the Unitarian lower clergy and their contemporary social-cultural activity, and the influence of Protestant colleges. She is also interested in the use and publication of ego-documents which create new opportunities in the research of the history of science. Szakál has been working at the Archives of the Institute of Ethnology since 2021, where together with János Bednárik she developed the new structure of the archives. Also, in cooperation with her colleagues, they started (re)arranging the materials and developed a new strategy for expanding the collection.

In last year's ARP Ambassador project, Anna Szakál’s main focus was to assess the possibilities offered by the ARP data repository for the Archives and the Institute of Ethnology, and reposited a contemporary folklore collection of Katalin Vargha. In 2024, they are working together with other collections of contemporary folklore texts archived and referenced in the framework of the MTA Estonian-Hungarian bilateral project entitled Global and local elements in contemporary folklore in Hungary and Estonia, led by Katalin Vargha. They are also working on the development of an ethnographic metadata scheme.