Folklore school games

This paper reports on the Folklore School Games project which was conducted as part of the UCD Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive (IVRLA) series of demonstrator research projects. The project, which was inspired by the example of the 1937-38 Schools’ Scheme (a comprehensive survey of folklore, including games, collected from schoolchildren throughout Ireland which is held in the National Folklore Collection at UCD), was undertaken from October to December 2009 and collected contemporary accounts from children of games they play. The remit of the IVRLA demonstrator projects was to provide digital research resources and to show how digital repositories could not only provide access to archival research materials but could also present material in new ways and suggest themes for further research. This project does so by presenting outputs of the research as a digital collection of image and audio files, and specifically links the 2009 project with the earlier work by including scanned extracts relating to children’s games from the 1937-38 scheme. The paper gives an overview of the project aims, details the planning and conduct of the fieldwork, reports on the material collected and digitised, and concludes by suggesting ways in which this research could be further developed.