Paper short abstract:

Paper about the making of an integrated digital archive created by the re-organisation of materials in several folklore archives and databases of folktales.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will describe the combination of digital data originated from several archives and research projects. The Ísmús database was originally a web interface for the Árni Magnússon Institute's folklore audio archive and was later expanded to be also a database about musicology and the history of music in Iceland.

Work on the Sagnagrunnur database of Icelandic folk legends began in 1999, and in the space of three years came to include information about over 10,000 legends in print. Over the course of time, the database has continued to develop with extended material from the research project on the collection and publication process of Jón Árnason's Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri (1862-1864). The main aim of this project was to carefully document the process that lay behind the first main collection of folk tales in Iceland. The focus of the project was on documenting all materials relating to the collection of Jón Árnason's work, involving the scanning and transcription of letters between Jón Árnason, his collectors, and his fellow editors. The data in Ísmús, in Sagnagrunnur, from the research project about Jón Árnason's collection and more material has now been joined in a new database giving researchers and the general public access to vast collection of folklore material spanning a period from the mid-nineteenth century till the present day.