- University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Research Guides
- Folklore
- Databases and E-Journals
Folklore : Databases and E-Journals
This guide presents resources and tips useful for students in folklore classes. Topics covered include folklore, folklife, and folkways.
Ask me a question!
Thomas Durkin
Contact:
Social Work Library
Room 236
School of Social Work Building
1350 University Avenue
Madison, WI 53706
Room 236
School of Social Work Building
1350 University Avenue
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-3283
Website
Welcome/About the Folklore Guide
Welcome to the Folklore LibGuide. This guide is designed to cover the various facets of the study of folklore, including: folktales, folklife, folkways, and material culture.
Please note that most of the resources listed here are also available from the Main Libraries Web Site.
If you have any questions, please contact Tom Durkin. (Additional contact information at left).
Core Folklore Research Tools
- JSTORJSTOR is a full-text journal database which provides access to more than 1,200 titles in many academic fields, including folklore.
- MLA International Bibliography"Indexes 4,000 periodicals in English and other languages as well as books, book chapters, and dissertations. Its subject matter includes critical works on literature, language, linguistics, film, and folklore."
- ProjectMuse"Provides full text access to more than 300 humanities and social science journals from various publishers. Disciplines covered include art, anthropology..."
Additional Literature Databases and E-Journals Useful for Folklore Research
All of these databases can be found in the Database Library. If you are trying to find the e-journal for a specific journal title, please try Citation Search.
- Encyclopedia Mythica"An online encyclopedia on mythology, folklore, and legends. It currently contains over 6,100 entries on gods and goddesses, heroes, legendary creatures and beings from all over the world."
- Ethnographic Thesaurus from the American Folklore Society [available in a post-beta version (version 2.0)]"A searchable online vocabulary that can be used to improve access to information about folklore, ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, and related fields. The American Folklore Society developed the Thesaurus in cooperation with the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress."
- Internet Sacred Text Archive"The largest freely available archive of online books about religion, mythology, folklore and the esoteric on the Internet."
- PsycArticles"Covers general psychology and specialized, basic, applied, clinical and theoretical research in psychology. The database contains more than 25,000 searchable full text articles from 40 journals."
- PsycINFO (Psychological Abstracts)"Contains more than one million citations and summaries of journal articles, book chapters, books, dissertations and technical reports, all in the field of psychology. It also includes information about the psychological aspects of related disciplines such as sociology, education, linguistics, and anthropology. Journal coverage, which spans from 1887 to present, includes international material selected from more than 1,700 periodicals in over 35 languages."
- SocINDEX with Full TextIncludes full text for 397 "core coverage" sociology journals dating back to 1908 and 150 "priority coverage" journals. It also includes full text for more than 720 books and 6,743 conference papers. Abstracts for more than 800 journals are available back to 1895. In addition, SocINDEX with Full Text features more than 10,000 Author Profiles covering the most prolific, most cited, and most frequently searched for authors in the database.
- World Folklore & Folklife Database"Tracing the origins and development of all aspects of traditional cultures around the world, this resource provides a wealth of information related to the myths, legends, and folktales of a particular people."
Databases Relevant to Folk Art, Crafts, and Material Culture
- Art Full TextProvides indexing and abstracting of over 600 key English and foreign-language periodicals, yearbooks, and museum bulletins, including select full-text coverage beginning in 1997. Nearly 2,000 art dissertations are also abstracted and indexed. Its subject matter covers archaeology, architecture, art history, crafts, decorative arts, graphic arts, industrial and interior design, landscape architecture, museology, and film, video, and photography.
- ARTstorContains over one million images in the areas of western and non-western architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, design, visual culture, and material culture.
- Wisconsin Decorative Arts DatabaseResource for the study of craft traditions, manufacturing, state and local history, and material culture. This searchable archive brings together examples of furniture, ceramics, textiles, and other 19th and early 20th century material culture artifacts from the collections of museums and historic sites across Wisconsin.
Databases Relevant to Folk Music/Dance and Ethnomusicology
- DRAM (Database of Recorded American Music)"A primary focus of the collection is the preservation and dissemination of hard-to-find yet culturally and academically important music. Featured music ranges from 19th and 20th century classical genres to early rock, folk music to opera, Native American to jazz, historical musical theater to new music, electronic and beyond."
- Irish Sheet Music ArchivesThe Irish Sheet Music Archives website is the home of the online sheet music collections found in the Ward Irish Music Archives located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Browse and search over 5,000 pieces of Irish and Irish American themed sheet music in our collections.
- Local Centers/Global Sounds : Historic Recordings and Midwestern Musical VernacularsThe Mills Music Library and the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, along with many partners at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, are pleased to present a growing collection of unique, historic, regional and endangered sound recordings with related documentation. These include 78-rpm recordings produced for immigrant, ethnic, and indigenous audiences by American companies in the first half of the 20th century; and more than 700 hours of original field and home recordings from the 1950s through the 1990s featuring the Upper Midwest's culturally diverse traditional musicians.
- Oxford Music OnlineOxford Music Online is the gateway to Grove Music Online, the Oxford Companion to Music and the Oxford Dictionary of Music.
- Roud Folksong and Broadside IndexesThe Folk Song Index and Broadside Index are compiled by Steve Roud and are included on the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library (VWML) website with his permission. The Folk Song Index seeks to provide details of English-language traditional songs which have been recorded in any medium - books, journals, newspapers, manuscript collections in public and private hands, published or unpublished sound recordings, videos, websites, and so on.
- Smithsonian Global Sound for LibrariesProduced in partnership with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. The collection ranges from blues to children’s songs, American folk to spoken word and sounds, and is a virtual encyclopedia of the world's musical and aural traditions.
- Wisconsin Folksong CollectionThis is a database of the recordings made by Helene Stratman-Thomas during the summers of 1940, 1941, and 1946, the years of her folksong gathering projects in Wisconsin. The database documents nearly 800 performances representing over thirty ethnic or geographical sources,
Databases Relevant to Food/Cooking
- Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook ProjectThe Michigan State University Library and the MSU Museum have partnered to create an online collection of some of the most influential and important American cookbooks from the late 18th to early 20th century.
Additional Helpful Anthropology Literature Databases
All of these databases can be found in the Anthropology/Archaeology list of databases in the Database Library.
- AnthroSourceDeveloped by the American Anthropological Association (AAA), AnthroSource brings 100 years of anthropological material online to scholars and the public. AnthroSource is an online resource serving the research, teaching, and professional needs of anthropologists. It contains current issues for 15 of the AAA's most critical peer-reviewed publications, American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, and Medical Anthropology Quarterly. It also includes an electronic archive of all AAA journals, and seamless access to archival content housed at JSTOR for key AAA publications including American Anthropologist.
- Anthropological LiteratureProduced by one of the world's foremost anthropology libraries, Anthropological Literature indexes entries at least two pages long in more than 900 journals and monographic series held in Harvard University's Tozzer Library. These include articles, reports, commentaries and obituaries.
- Anthropological Index OnlineAnthropological Index Online contains citations for more than 750 international journals and special interest publications in all areas of anthropology and archaeology. In anthropology, all geographical regions are covered, with particularly strong coverage of Eastern and Central Europe. In archaeology, coverage concentrates on Eastern and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific; Western Europe and Classical antiquity are not covered in great detail.
Gender & Women's Studies Resources
- Women's Studies International"Indexes women's studies, women's issues, and gender-focused books, book chapters, journal and magazine articles, dissertations, and reports from throughout the world, starting in about 1972."
General Multi-Topic Research Databases
- Academic SearchA general academic index that indexes almost 3,000 magazines and journals from every academic discipline and provides the full-text of more than 1,200.
- Google Scholar"Enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research."
- Web of ScienceA combination of three databases: Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index; Web of Science indexes more than 12,000 peer-reviewed journals, providing complete bibliographic data and author abstracts. It is also possible to search by cited authors and to find articles sharing one or more cited reference.
General Reference Databases
These resources, as well as a variety of others are available on the Database Library list of Reference Sources. They are general in scope, and not limited to the study of Folklore.
- Gale eBooks"A database of encyclopedias and other specialized reference sources from Gale and their publishing partners. Titles are individually selected, and therefore the Collection is not standard at all institutions. Titles are displayed on the home page, categorized by broad subject area. You may also click the Title List link found below the GVRL product banner to view an alphabetical list of all titles in our collection."
- Oxford Reference Online"Combines rich and scholarly resources with authoritative, quick-reference coverage of the full subject spectrum. Over 130 subject dictionaries, plus the World Encyclopedia, offer unrivalled coverage of everything from art to accountancy, politics to physics, and computing to classics."
Getting Dissertations
Using the links below, you have a variety of options for locating dissertations. Please note that UW-Madison dissertations are kept in Memorial Library. It usually takes up to a year for a completed dissertation to be added to the library collection. You can look for UW-Madison dissertations in the Library Catalog.
- Help pages for locating dissertations and ordering via Interlibrary LoanUse this site to get help when looking for dissertations.
- ProQuest Dissertations & Theses GlobalIncludes doctoral dissertations in all subject areas completed at over 700 institutions in the U.S. and around the world. Some masters theses are also included. The database offers full text for most of the dissertations added since 1997 and strong retrospective full text coverage for older graduate works.