A Digital Library for Preservation of Folklore Crafts, Skills, and Rituals and Its Role in Folklore Education

Abstract

The importance of folklore can be manifested by Alan Jabbour’s speech in the 100^th anniversary of American Folklore Society-“folklore reflects on the ancestral missions that have shapes us, the inherited values that we reflect and must radiate into the future”. Currently, most of the digital preservation projects focus mainly on digitizing artifacts, in which the crafts of how to make them and skills of how to use them are neglected. Besides, folklore and religious rituals embed spiritual meanings. Step-by-step procedure of a ritual is not trivial for a people or a religion. The motivation of this project are manifested in three aspects: (1) folklore crafts, skills, and rituals play the same important roles in preserving our ancestor’s wisdom in addition to folklore artifacts; (2) media richness facilitates learning of courses with high uncertainty and equivocality; and (3) e-learning with interactive videos gains more learner satisfaction than non-interactive and traditional classroom learning according to recent studies. In this paper, video clips are used for recording step-by-step crafts, skills, and rituals. The metadata used here are modified from our previous work regarding digital preservation of Taiwanese folklore artifacts by emphasizing the “Relation” element in linking individual steps together. A website served as an extension to digital library of folklore artifacts has been constructed to be used as an e-learning platform for folklore education in obligatory and higher education. The system not only constructs a digital library for folklore preservation but provides instructional interactive materials with media richness to support a more effective method for folklore education than non-interactive or traditional classroom learning.