Paper short abstract:

My paper will discuss problems and questions raised by conceptualizing and building a digital archive for the Department of Folklore at ELTE. The presentation will focus on ethical and methodological questions as well as the problem of dissemination.

Paper long abstract:

My paper will discuss problems and questions raised by conceptualizing and building a digital archive for the Department of Folklore at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. From the establishment of the department (1940s), in addition to a library, a physical folklore archive was established, which stored mainly manuscripts from various fieldwork trips, organized by the department and other affiliated materials. Although the archive is very rich (more than 1000 manuscripts), it was never a professional unit at the university, selection and archiving methods were haphazard and the archive never had a dedicated staff member. After the 1990s the expansion of the archive just simply stopped due to the changes in collecting techniques and archiving formats, to uncertainties of staffing, and to shifts in the aims and paradigms of the discipline. These changes led to a "digital dark age" in the history of the department. Although for the last 30 years the two departments (folklore and ethnography) organized summer fieldtrips for students nearly every year, the collected materials were not organized systematically; they are irretrievable and untraceable and thus most of them are lost for future research.

To change this practice, in 2021 we launched a new university course (Archiving methods in ethnology and folklore studies) using an open source content management system (Omeka S) to digitally archive and display the different Institute-related research materials. I will discuss the questions and problems raised by this initiative mainly related to ethical and methodological questions as well as the problem of dissemination.