Folklore

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To visit the archive during its non-regular hours, one must have an appointment. An appointment can be made by emailing the archive.

UC Berkeley's Folklore Archive contains approximately 1,000,000 items of folklore from around the world, organized in alphabetical order by country or geographical area, and catalogued according to genre. Although the bulk of material is Anglo-American, there are records from over two hundred countries and cultural groups.

Genres include blason populaire, counting-out rhymes, jokes, folk beliefs, dance, drama, folk speech, games, legends, mnemonic devices, songs and song parodies. Special classifications include religious lore, family lore, and scout lore.

For each item of folklore, the name, age, occupation, and ethnic background of the informant are listed with a brief exegesis including the context in which the item is used, the circumstances of collection, the informant's explanation of the item and its meaning, and interpretation and analysis by the collector.

The archive is currently being digitized to facilitate complex search across multiple fields of metadata and for the discovery of latent patterns in the folklore.