Digitizing Serbian Folklore: What has Been Done and What is to Be Done

Abstract

The paper focuses on the digitisation of Serbian folklore, including databases, archives, repositories, and libraries. It first provides a brief overview of the main and best-known South Slavic folklore and ethnography digitisation projects carried out in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Bulgaria, singling out the work on Bulgarian folklore digitisation by Todor Molov and his students as an exemplary model. The main part of the paper focuses on the digitisation of folklore and ethnographic databases, collections, studies, and journals, as well as archival and fieldwork records in Serbia. A special emphasis is laid on the specialised folklore databases and editions created by the folklore scholar Mirjana Detelić and a group of authors, as a model which has no parallel even beyond Serbia. It then presents the digitisation of folklore and ethnographic collections and studies carried out by the major Serbian libraries and scholarly, educational and cultural institutions, and local libraries and museums. It also takes a critical look at the most important Serbian and South-Slavic folklore volunteer and international digitisation projects. As for multi-modal fieldwork archives and databases, the Milman Parry multi-modal database, the Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition, and the Digital Archive of the Institute for Balkan Studies, Belgrade (DABI), are particularly singled out. Finally, a critical evaluation of the digitisation projects and suggestions as to what yet needs to be done in the digitisation of Serbian folklore are proposed.