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BULLETIN OF SLOVENE ETHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY
CONTENTS
The first section of the Bulletin entitled Slovene Ethnology brings a questionnaire on the research of Slovene migration, composed by Marija Stanovnik of Slovene Ethnographic Institute in Ljubljana. The questionnaires which deal with all aspects of man's life and knowledge have for some years served as an additional resource for Slovene ethnologists tfying to reveal the way of life of Slovenes. Slovene Ethnological Society has also published them as separate volumes (from I 'o XI). The present questionnaire thus presents an addition to this work.
In the section on European Ethnology dr. Frank Förster from German Democratic Republic writes about results of sociolinguistic research among industrial Sorb workers. Dr. Förster, who is a vice-manager at the Institute for Research of Sorbs at the Academy of Science in Bautzen, German Democratic Republic, speaks in his article about linguistic Problems of the afore-mentioned workers at work and at home.
Borut Korun from Ljubljana writes about Mexican gods in the sections dedicated to Non-European Ethnology. The author discusses at length religion and deities of Mexican Indians.
In our regular section entitled Film Corner Nasko Kritnar ponders the meaning of film for ethnological research. He reviews the work of Allison and Marek Jablonko, United States of America, who presented their work to Slovene ethnologists on February 23 and 24 of this year. The lectures were supplemented by their own films.
Our next section dealing with Book Reviews brings a review of Traditiones, the anthology of Slovene Ethnographic Institute in Ljubljana, written by Ingrid Slavec.
Inga MiklavSii- Brezigar writes about an ethnological department of the newly renovated museum collection in Toimin in the following section about ethnological Events und Exhibits.
Bibliography of seminary and diploma papers of ethnology students at the Faculty of Arts and Letters in Ljubljana f°r the 1983/84 school year has been prepared by Ingrid Slavec. The same author has also compiled the Chronicle of events concerning Slovene Ethnological Society in the next section.
The last section of the Bulletin deals with Meetings and Conferences and brings minutes and reports from the regular atnual meeting of Slovene Ethnological Society.
The photograph in the Ethnological History in Pictures series shows sottie of the participants of the regular 1979 annual Meeting of Slovene Ethnological Society.
1984
POSSIBILITIES FOR COMPUTER PROCESSING OF DOCUMENTAR Y MA TERIAL ON FOLKLORE {ABSTRACT)
Up until now the preservation of documentary material on folklore, where notes on oral tradition, folk music and a"ce, folk theatre, folk literature and customs are deposited, has been passive (technical). The proposed computer Processing passively preserves material by entering data on magnetic tape, while making it accessible to active preservation and thus ensuring the maximum possibility for it to be used. The programme of computerization consists of three Ve,s: processing of data (obtained by means of a machine-readable questionnaire) on institutions which collect materia! c°ncerrting traditional culture and folklore; formation of a data base with a bibliographic description of folklore Material («/ present this is being done experimentally for documentary material at the Institute for Research of xtore); bibliographic processing of each unit according to previously established classification groups and text Pressing of the material.
j will not deal on this occasion with theoretical considerations of the relation of folklore to folklore documentation, "as the implications of changes in media and the loss of the actual performance context or possible shifts in func-jQ and esthetic features resulting when what was once "living" material is set down in fixed form. Rather, I wish to >nuÍS my aUention on Points relevant to folklore materials in the form of records, that is, record of oral literature, folk of nC anii dance> folk ,flealer> popular literature, and customs. These are categories defined in terms of the content Materials. In this presentation I will also distinguish between various media used for storing materials: print (published
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collections), manuscript collections (handwritten notes and transcriptions from tape recordings), audio materials {magnetic tapes and cassettes, photographic materials (prints and slides), films and video materials.
Over the last century many have voiced the need for the collection of materials in Croatia, for example, Vraz, Kukuljevič and Rački. Antun Radič in hit famous publication "Osnova'' stated that the primary task of the Annals of Folklife and Folkways (Zbornik za narodni život i običaje ZNŽO) was to collect and analyse materials /6/. Up to about thirty years ago, these Annals and the archives of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts played the most significant role in the collection and preservation of materials. More recently, particularly since the Second World War, large-scale folklore archival projects have been undertaken with the primary aim of preserving materials collected in the field.
Such passive (technical) preservation, and this is the most prevalent type of preservation, is also carried out by other types of archives. Techniques include plastic coating of the pages of manuscripts, binding, micro-films, phonograph records for long-term storage of audio materials, re-recording of tapes and cassettes, reproduction of film and photographic materials etc. The extent of the folklore documentation, the availability of funds, and the opportunities for publication determine the best way to preserve this type of material.
These methods of preservation do not, however, solve the problem of the demand for analysis and processing of folklore documentation and published materials. This demand has risen in part because of a decline in publication opportunities in proportion to the ever increasing amount of materials collected. Another cause is increased interest among readers, other audiences (for example, college students), the informed public, and the mass media. Thus to the primary function of colecting folklore for storage as documentation, a complementary function has been added-that of collecting for use.
Consequently, I believe that if we do not have ready access to any given data in our folklore documentation, its purpose has not been completely fulfilled.
To solve the problems of both storage and access to material we have turned to computers, that is, to the possibility of using machines for storing and processing materials. As we can see, computers have the following advantages:
1.	Materials are stored safely, since they themselves and all data relevant to them are fed into the terminal and recorded, in other words, preserved, on magnetic tapes.
2.	The materials are processed (by programs with appropriate indexes enabling us to search for and retrieve them) and are thus readily available for use. This is what we call active storage.
THE APPLICATION OF (COMPUTER) DATA PROCESSING TO FOLKLORE DOCUMENTATION ABROAD -AN OVERVIEW
Electronic Data Processing of Folklore documentation was first attempted in the U.S. in the late 1960s, and focussed on textual analysis of folklore materials. Research showed that the existing technology was not equal to the task (this is still the case today with regard lo textual processing), and so the first results were of very limited significance. Feeding the Thompson index into the computer and giving it instructions to index the tales proved to be impossible /7/. In 1968 research begun at the Folklore and Mythology Studies Department of the Universty of California at Los Angeles, and six years later the results were published. With the data in their archives increasingly difficult to manage nad locate, a team assigned to this problem created a mechanical search program for use on IBMs /2/. Access to material according to the following criteria wai thus made possible: I. title and medium 2. general categories (classified by genre in terms of available indexes such as the AuTh) 3. information on the data, place and context of collection 4. researcher 5. informant. Each of these general headings was divided up into more specific areas, making it possible te search and retrieve materials from each area. This would be impossible in a conventional catalog of this size.
At the Folklore Institute in Bloomington, data on folklore materials are fed into the Electronic Data Processing System according to the folowtng classifications: I. data on the informant and collector 2. data on the location 3. types of materials with regard to genre 4. key words for each type of material. Computer processing requires that each of the above-mentioned categories be coded. Genre and key-word indexes are complied according to content criteria from the materials and according to user needs.
The experiences of the Scandinavian countries are of special significance to us because of similarities in materials, and because of the high caliber of their library, archive, and information sciences. A survey «'« carried out in ¡968, the results of which were published in /972, of all the institutions in Scandinavia involved in the preservation of primary folklore materials. Questionnaires were sent to eighty-four institutions (museums, institutes, collections, faculties, etc.) asking for the following information: name of institution, address, telephone, organizational structure, programs /activities, size and quality of archives (acquisition, catalogues, services), publications /5/, In the 1974 the first Nordic Folklore Archive and Documentation Conference was held in Turk. Electronic Data Processing was criticized on this occasion because of the financial and personnel commitments it involves. Reflection on the use of computers gave birth to a unified systems of data processing, the minimum data for each archive being as follows: systematization according to a detailed register of localities, the first and last name of the researcher, and the time and place, in which the research under consideration was carried out ///. At the second conference, held in Turk in /978, attempts were made to refine further the centralized data system thus conceived. The possibilities were brought up of plugging folklore documentation into the national information system, joint cataloguing systems, and the creation of an indexing system for computerized materials /3/. The third archive and documentation conference was held in Copenhagen in September, 1982, and generally confirmed the usefulness and indispensability of Electronic Data Processing for the analysis of folklore materials. The schema proposed at the conference for processing individual records includes 16 fields. They are, in addition to the minimum required identification codes, as follows: medium, collection method, classification by content' classification by key word, classification by title and first line /4/. I gather from the report cited that indexes for the classifications listed are entered as the data is fed in. and that search and retrieval is effected by means of arbitrary word constructions in the text. The team that worked out this system suggests that flexible entries be created so that optif^ capacity can be reached, and that the entries be based primarily on the content of the materials.
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REPORT ON THE COLLABORATION OF THE INSTITUTE FOR FOLKLORE RESEARCH AND THE UNIVERSITY COMPUTER CENTER - TEAM FOR COMPUTERIZATION OF FOLKLORE DOCUMENTATION AND MATERIALS*
We took the commonplace ■ that computers and all other technological aids can have no place or role in the processing of data other than what we assign them as our starting point, and set out goals in three complementary fields in which electronics/computers can be of use.
1.	A project for offering systematic and comprehensive information on existing materials ahout traditional culture and foklore: the creation of a reference center, that is, an organized services offering users guidance in finding information source on the basis of secondary and tertiary source (answering questions about where what can be found).
2.	The creation of a folklore materials information base with uniform general data (research, title of materials, date and location recorded, manuscripts, medium). This represents a step forward from the question of where to find what to where to find what type of content in the materials.
3.	The application of two types of processing to each unit of material individually. They are:
3.1.	Bibliographic processing of unit according to u predesignated index (of classifications).
3.2.	Analysis of written materials by textual processing.
The problems arising in projects such as this, which have also been observed by other institutions involved in this kind of work, fall into three main ureas:
time - the programming base for a computer program thus conceived should take about five years to compile (this is supported by the experience of centers that have introduced experimental computerization).
funds - computer is very expensive considering the means at our disposal; one hour gross on a UN/VAC system processor costs the user 30,000 dinars.
collaboration ■ among folklorists, and between folklorists and documentation experts, folklorists and computer specialists. Since the two problems areas are beyond our control, our foremost task is to ensure smooth cooperation between those collaborating, for the first requisite of a system thus conceived is team-work.
PRIMARY RESULTS OF ELECTRONIC DA TA
PROCESSING
A questionnaire (suitable for computerized data analysis) was written as a step towards establishing the reference center. Three rounds of surveys using this questionnaire brought in data on 90% of the insinuations in SR Croatia involved in the collection and storage of materials on traditional culture and folklore. The questionnaire asked for information on the following: I. name of institution/organization, 2. name of the collection or department that acquires and stores materials (with names of directors), 3. address of the collection or department. 4. other collections within the sanie institution (if applicable), 5. type of institution or collection (scientific or academic Institution, museum, private collection, school collection, church collection, Departments for the Preservation of Historical Monouments), 6. user service (number of visitors yearly), 7. head of documentation and libraries (if documentation is centralized: if not, the museum or collection custodian is considered the head), 8. year in which the collection or department wws established, 9. ¡^formation about materials (type of materials and inventory numbers). 10. information on catalogues systematizing the Materials in any way. It. information on publications by the institution (title of annual, catalogue no,, etc.), 12. date on which the questionnaire was completed, and first and last names of the person responsible for the accuracy of the information given.
This questionnaire has also been completed by a small percentage of the relevant institutions in (SR) Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and Slovenia.
In SR Croatia 118 institutions with 136 collections or departments that collect or house materials on traditional cuhure and folklore have been regis!red. Seven of these are academic institutions, 74 are museums, 9 school collections, 2 Private collections, IS curch collections, 3 collections belonging to art and culture associations and five Departments for the Preservation of Historical Monouments. 105 offer services to users, the average number yearly ranging from lo00-10,000. 40 institutions have manuscript collections, 108 ethnographic artifacts, 56 photograph collections, 18 collections of phonograph records; 2 institutions have video-tape collections, 14 films, 31 centralized documentation, and ?3 have libraries. According to our data the oldest collection was founded in 1860 (the collection of the Franciscan Monastery in Sinj) and the newest in 1981 (the Local Heritage Museum in Zelina); we can assume that the materials in Afférent collections also follow some sort of chronology. We are reasonably certain that we can now determine the total number of etnographic artifacts in museums in SR Croatia, the total number of manuscript collections, photographs, Magnetic tapes recorded during fieldwork, the total number of visitors and users who take advantage of these Materials, the total number of museum catalogues and a complete list of the ethnographic and folklore annuals and ethologies appearing in SR Croatia. Given the comprehensiveness of this information, we can move on to the second Phase of data collection, during which bibliographical data about materials is to be collected. The results wilt comprise data base for our reference center.
The following data on folklore materials will be included in the data base (which has been experimentally formulated f<>r the documentation at ZIF - the Institute for Folklore Research):
data on mongraphs (anthologies or studies, with documentation) 2- data on articles and contributions to journals, with documentation ■ Data on unpublished materials.