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Events of the SIEF Working Group on Archives

UPCOMING EVENTS

CALL FOR PAPERS

Tradition archives in motion: sounding out good practices and challenges with folk collections

International Conference | 29. June – 1 July 2026 | Freiburg, Germany

Tradition archives in motion: sounding out good practices and challenges with folk collections Conference Photo: Univ. Freiburg/ZPKM

Organised by the Centre for Popular Culture and Music, University of Freiburg in cooperation with the SIEF Working Group on Archives and the Institute for Cultural Analysis of the Germans of Eastern Europe

Folklore and tradition archives, as well as GLAM institutions in general, are making more and more materials available online in a mediatised world. Resources such as online collections enable direct access to ethnographic and historical sources and enhance research possibilities; curated online dissemination and exhibitions present selected holdings and research results. As the internet is a very audiovisual medium, such content is often built around attractive visual and sound documents in order to reach out to the general public and to communities connected to and interested in the collections.

Ongoing discussions in our field focus on the potentials and challenges that are created once the step into the digital realm has been taken. Collections of culture, in the form of digitised and born-digital data, become ‘mobile’: archival staff envision and implement new ways of processing, researching, presenting, and communicating information, while considering participatory modes of design for research and archiving. These changes come with a whole range of conceptual and technical considerations that shape the ways in which folk and ethnographic archives deal with folklore/cultural heritage, partner institutions, and communities.

The conference aims to address topical issues such as long-term safeguarding, digitisation, access to collections, community management, and target audiences, to name a few. While typical discussions often focus on ‘best practice’ examples, we would also like to spotlight what is feasible by asking what ‘good practice’ is in times of scarce resources, technological uncertainties, and institutional emphasis on ‘visibility’.

We invite scholars and practitioners of all qualification levels to send in proposals focusing on the following (or related) topics:
- Access: Accessing (audiovisual) collections – how and for whom?
- Communities: Tradition archives – what is ‘good practice’ in working with communities, and who are our communities?
- Exhibiting folklore: Should tradition archives do what museums do – and to what extent?
- AI: are there use cases, can (or should) ‘artificial intelligence’ be used, and can it be used ethically in folklore archives?
- Good practice: What can folklore and tradition archives offer to society? What are we really good at?

Proposals should include a paper title, an abstract of no longer than 250 words, a short biographical note, and affiliation/contact information.

The organisers will try to reimburse costs for travel and accommodation for attendees with no institutional funding.

Deadline: 5 Oct. 2025
Contact: archives2026(at)zpkm.uni-freiburg.de

PAST EVENTS

ARCHIVES OF TRADITIONAL CULTURE: 100 + 10

The conference, which celebrated the Archive’s 100th anniversary, dealt with both historical and contemporary documentation and addreseds a diverse range of issues relating to the past, present, and future of archives of traditional culture. Maryna Chernyavska, co-chair of the WGoA, was one of the keynote speakers. She discussed the role of folklore archives in shaping societal memory about past and present. The other keynoter wasSanita Rainsone, who focused on the collaborative aspects of folklore archives and their digital futures in the emerging era of artificial intelligence.

Online Webinar Series in Partnership With SAMLA

Recordings of past webinars are available here.

Folklore Archive Webinars - May 2023
Siv Gøril Brandtzæg
From tradition to tablet: Constructing a database of Norwegian skilling ballads

Folklore Archives Webinars - March 2023
Katherine Borland & Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth
The University Folklore Archives: Institutional or Community Resource?

Folklore Archives Webinars - February 2023
Christina Crowder
Community-Centered Models for Musical Folklore Projects:
The Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project and the Klezmer Archive Project

Folklore Archives Webinars - January 2023
James Deutsch
Festivals as Teaching Tools for Folklore Archives

Folklore Archives Webinars - December 2022
Dr. Ioannis Karachristos & Dr. Paraskevas Potiropoulos
Traditional Folklore archives in the Digital era. Curation and documentation, challenges and prospects in the Hellenic Folklore Research Centre Archive

Folklore Archives Webinars - Novemeber 2022
Mari Sarv & Kati Kallio
Towards a lab of folklore texts: explorations on Finnic oral poetry

Folklore Archives Webinars - May 2022

Tim Tangherlini
Professor, Dept of Scandinavian and the Program in Folklore
University of California, Berkeley

"Multilingual Search and Challenges for the Archive in the 21st Century: Lessons from ISEBEL"

Folklore Archives Webinars - April 2022

Presentation by Elija Stark, (Docent, Development manager, Finnish Literature Society), entitled:
"From genre analysis to examination of everyday narratives. A short history of the vocabulary" uses in the Folklore archives of the Finnish Literature Society

ARCHIVES, ACCESS, ETHICS AND FRAUD

Quod oculus non videt, cor non dolet?

A SIEF Archives Working Group Conference
Amsterdam, October 21 – 23, 2020

Organised by: Meertens Instituut, Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185, 1012 DK Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Event is cancelled and theme is moved to SIEF2021 as a work group panel

Panels at SIEF2019 14th Congress, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 14-17 April 2019

Keeping track of your field data; convenors Maryna Chernyavska and Kelly Fitzgerald
Participatory Archives in a Transforming World; convenors Sanita Reinsone and Ave Goršič

17–19 October 2018 conference History, Memory, and Archives: Sensitive Issues took place in Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, Vilnius

Conference was dedicated to the Centenary of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland. For more information, click here

7th March to 9th March 2018 The Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries Conference took place in University of Helsinki, Finland. Conference was looking to extend the scope of digital humanities research covered, both into new areas, as well as beyond the Nordic and Baltic countries.

There was an archives panel within the conference - for more details, see here.

For more information, please visit conference website.

In September 14–16, 2016, the conference “Towards Digital Folkloristics. Research Perspectives. Archival Praxis. Ethical Challenges” took place in Riga, Latvia. The conference was devoted to the rapidly evolving field of digital folkloristics with a particular focus on tradition archives dealing with information technology.

For further information, please visit the conference website.

The Network of Nordic and Baltic Tradition Archives took place in Copenhagen, August 18, 2015 at the Dansk Folkemindesamling (The Danish Folklore Archives), Det Kongelige Bibliotek (The Royal Library).