Norway

NORWEGIAN FOLKLORE ARCHIVE

Norsk Folkeminnesamling (NFS)

Founded in 1914, the Norwegian Folklore Archives serves as a national archive of cultural-historical texts and source materials. The archives are located at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS) at the University of Oslo. Throughout its history, NFS has been a unique national archive that has striven to collect, preserve, and present traditional texts and source materials — what is often called our cultural heritage. This corpus has been at the heart of research on Norwegian folklore and cultural history since its founding. In 2012, the core of the cultural heritage archive was selected for inclusion in the Norwegian Memory of the World registry (Norges Dokumentarv) under the auspices of UNESCO.

Collections

The material largely concerns written records of orally transmitted forms of popular poetry, such as folktales, legends, and ballads, collected during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A catch-all term for such materials is folklore records.

Web

Homepage: www.hf.uio.no/ikos/english/services/norwegian-folklore/

https://www.facebook.com/folkeminnesamlingen

Address

P. A. Munchs hus, B413, Niels Henrik Abels vei 36, 0371 OSLO Tlf. + 47 22854919.

Postal address Pb1010 Blindern, 0315 Oslo Norway


NORWEGIAN ETHNOLOGICAL RESEARCH

Norsk etnologisk gransking (NEG)

Started in 1946 and located at the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History (Norsk Folkemuseum), the initial charter of NEG was to document skills, practices and knowledge from pre-industrial agrarian communities. A national network of respondents for answering topical qualitative questionnaires was established. Documenting the intangible culture of everyday life is still the main purpose of the archive and collecting answers to qualitative questionnaires is still the main method. Since the late 1970s the topics have been both contemporary and historical. Since 2011 the questionnaires have been issued both on paper and through web-based electronic forms. The archive is inscribed in the UNESCO program Memory of the world.

Collections

On average, NEG has carried out four questionnaire-based documentation projects each year. The number of answers to each project varies from 50 to 700. In addition, the archive has initiated and participated in projects collecting sound-recorded interviews. We cooperated in a national diary project and collected and archived approximately 16,000 accounts of a single day, April 26th, 2005. In addition to this core of documentation initiated by the archive, we have received a great variety of donations of autobiographical materials and documentations of the skills and practices of the everyday life.

Web

norskfolkemuseum.no/NEG

facebook.com/Minnebanken

twitter.com/minnebanken


Address

Norwegian Ethnological Research

Norsk Folkemuseum (The Norwegian Museum of Cultural History)

Museumsv.10, Oslo, +47 22 12 37 00

PO Box 720 Skøyen, 0214 Oslo, Norway

NORWEGIAN COLLECTION OF FOLK MUSIC

Norsk folkemusikksamling

The Norwegian Collection of Folk Music was founded in 1951 as an independent music research institute by Norway’s first professor of musicology, Olav Gurvin. From 1971–2013 it was part of the University of Oslo and since 2014 it has been part of the music section of the Norwegian National Library.

Collections

Roughly 2000 hours of sound recordings and 300 hours of video recordings, mainly from the archive's own fieldwork.

Web

www.nb.no/folkemusikk

www.facebook.com/Norsk-FolkemusikksamlingNorwegian-Collection-of-Folk-Music-167182869979460/

Address

Henrik Ibsens gate 110, Oslo, Norway
Postboks 2674 Solli, 0203 Oslo, Norway tel. +47 810 013 00