What is the study of folk literature called?
Folklore studies
The researchers must be comfortable in fieldwork; going out to meet their informants where they live, work, and perform.
They need to access archives housing a vast array of unpublished folklore collections.
They will want work with folk museums, to both view the collections, and present their own findings.
Bibliographies maintained by libraries and on line contain an important trove of articles from around the world.
The use of indexes allow them to view and use the categorization of artifacts which have already been established.
All work by a folklorist must be appropriately annotated in order to provide identifiable sources of the work.
For all folklorists terminology becomes a skill to master as they rub elbows not only with related academic fields but also with the colloquial understanding (what exactly is a fairy tale?). This shared vocabulary, with varying and sometimes divergent shades of meaning, needs to be used thoughtfully and consistently.
The use of printed sources to locate and identify further variants of a folk tradition is a necessary adjunct to the field research.
Because the transmission of folk artifacts preceded and ignored the establishment of national and political boundaries, it is important to cultivate international connections to folklorists in neighboring countries and around the world to compare both the artifacts researched and the methodology used.
A knowledge of the history of folklore studies is called for to identify the direction and more importantly the biases which the field has taken in the past, enabling us to temper the current analysis with more impartiality.[19][note 2]