Paper short abstract:

The digitization project SAMLA will establish a Norwegian digital folklore archive. It will make sources from three archives accessible online. What is the status of the project and what are the possibilities and challenges in conducting a trans-institutional digitization project?

Paper long abstract:

Norwegian tradition archives have in recent years have suffered from funding cuts and other challenges. Many of the collections are hard to access and even harder to search. A newly funded Research Council of Norway project, SAMLA (2020-2024), aims to reverse this, by establishing a national digital archive based on the collections of three mayor tradition archives in Norway. These archives hold records of a diversity of cultural expressions and practices of both majority, minority and indigenous cultures, in the form of folktales, ballads, beliefs, food and craft traditions, life stories as well as descriptions of children's games.

SAMLA aims to establish an online archive that will make this rich source material accessible for research, education and businesses. The project will establish a digital database that allows advanced searches across archive institutions and types of material. In that way, the project will enable in-depth analyses of specific practices, narratives and beliefs. The project also aims to coordinate this national archive with corresponding digital infrastructures in Denmark, Iceland, Sweden and elsewhere in Europe in order to facilitate for macroscopic understandings of the folklore material as large-scale cultural patterns.

This presentation will present the objectives and status of the project and also discuss some of the challenges in designing and conducting a trans-institutional digitization project.