The folktales of Asbjørnsen and Moe, legends about the hulder and the hidden people and ballads like Draumkvedet are important elements in Norwegian culture. The folktales are being read, the ballads sung, and most people have a conception of what a hulder might look like. And yet, the original sources to this folk culture are not easily accessible. SAMLA will change this situation.
SAMLA digitizes and makes accessible the archival material of the three main Norwegian tradition archives: The Norwegian Folklore Archives (Norsk Folkeminnesamling) at the University of Oslo, Norwegian Ethnological Research (Norsk etnologisk gransking) at The Norwegian Museum of Cultural History and The Ethnofolkloristic Archives (Etnofolkloristisk arkiv) at the University of Bergen. These archives contain a rich source material that will be made accessible at the web page samla.no as a joint digital archive. The technical infrastructure is created and maintained by the University Library at the University of Bergen.
The digital archive samla.no will for the most part be openly accessible. Thus, SAMLA will open a huge treasure chest of cultural history to be used by researchers, students, the cultural heritage sector, business and the general public. The material will mainly be readable as facsimiles. But through a pilot for machine reading of handwritten text and transcription by using crowdsourcing, SAMLA will facilitate a processing of making transcripts accessible.
Samla.no will make it possible to search for single phenomena and variants of single narratives, but also to search across archives, genres, and categories of material. Thereby samla.no will facilitate both local historical and cultural historical micro studies and transnational big data analyses.
SAMLA has developed authority registers for metadata for places, actors, and thesaurus. These are located at KulturNav and are openly accessible to other infrastructures. SAMLA utilizes international standards and has facilitated coordination with similar infrastructures in other countries. Initially, the source material in SAMLA will be harvested by the Intelligent Search Engine for Belief Legends. In the long run, the goal is to establish a Baltic-Nordic digital archive to enable searching across various forms of source material, and across countries and languages. SAMLA actively collaborates with tradition archives and digitization projects in other Nordic countries to achieve this objective in the future.
SAMLA is aimed at researchers and students in disciplines such as cultural history, cultural studies, museology, and history. At the same time, the material in SAMLA may also be relevant for researchers in environmental studies, biology, medicine, pharmacy, agronomy, and others. Moreover, SAMLA also wants to be accessible and used by a broader audience. There is significant potential to use the digital archive in education, the cultural heritage sector, and creative industries. Therefore, SAMLA has formed a user panel with representatives from fields such as teacher education, Sami language instruction, the museum sector, local history, traditional cuisine, game development, and fantasy literature. SAMLA also collaborates with the Local History Institute at the National Library in disseminating the project through Lokalhistoriewiki.no. Biographies of the best known and most active folklore collectors represented in SAMLA are continuously published there.
The digital archive samla.no will be launched on September 26, 2024. In the meantime, the website samla.no functions as a blog to communicate the project's work.
SAMLA will establish a national infrastructure for Norwegian intangible heritage from three tradition archives. These archives hold records of a diversity of cultural expressions and practises of both majority, minority and indigenous cultures in Norway, in the form of folktales, ballads, beliefs, food and craft traditions, life stories as well as descriptions of children's games. The material is valuable for research on everyday life and mentalities, attitudes and world views, and allows for the exploration of continuity and changes in cultural practices. The fundamental idea of SAMLA is in accordance with the FAIR principles, to make the data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.
The three partner archives are: Norsk Folkeminnesamling, University of Oslo (NFS), Norsk etnologisk gransking, Stiftelsen Norsk Folkemuseum (NEG) and Etnofolkloristisk arkiv (EFA), University of Bergen. The partner archives will work as three physical nodes located in Oslo and Bergen.
SAMLA will establish a digital database and an infrastructure that allows for advanced searches across archive institutions and types of material. The project also aims to coordinate this national infrastructure with corresponding digital infrastructures in Denmark, Iceland and Sweden, and with the European project Intelligent Search Engine for Belief Legends, ISEBEL. The e-infrastructure will be developed by the University of Bergen Library. The database will be openly accessible as a web-archive on the webpage samla.no.
