Paper short abstract:

The talk discusses problems related to the creating of an online version of the database of Estonian folk tales based on the folk tale collections of the Estonian Folklore Archives and issues arising in linking it with the digital archives of the Estonian Literary Museum.

Paper long abstract:

On the basis of the folklore collections of the Estonian Folklore Archives at the Estonian Literary Museum a significant number of genre-based online databases and portals have been created in the course of time. Due to the foci of interest of different teams and to project-based financing the databases have largely been genre-based or have had other definite limits. Starting from 1999 a folk tale work group has been active jointly at the University of Tartu and the Estonian Literary Museum. In addition to preparing folk tale publications and working on typology, its activities have included the creation of a database of folk tales. All in all, by now it contains over 10,000 folk tales.

In 2014-2015 on the basis of the typological database of folk tales was created an online database of Estonian folktales. In the course of this different problems arised - how to link the existing corpus of folk tale texts and the biographical database of fairy tales in a manner convenient to the user, how to relate it to the database of collectors and informants that has been formed partly on the basis of other analogous folklore databases. The key issue was linking the folk tale database to the digital archives "Kivike" of the Estonian Literary Museum that encompass different departments of the ELM, covering metadata, scanned manuscript files and texts fed to digital format.