Once Upon a Scheme: Conceptualizing Digital Fairy Tale and Folklore Classification Systems for Extra-Academic Professionals

This paper examines the utility of dominant fairy tale and folklore classification systems and indices such as the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index and the Stith-Thompson Motif Index to extra-academic professionals who regularly engage with fairy tales and folklore as a part of their work. It further utilizes readers’ advisory principles, particularly appeal- and story element-based readers’ advisory, in order to suggest a demographically-tailored descriptive schema capable of serving as the theoretical foundation for a fairy tale and folklore database intended for use not by academic folklorists and researchers but by youth librarians, school librarians, storytellers, and other professionals in fields other than research and academia. Extra-academic professionals were interviewed as key informants in order to gain insight into what elements of fairy tales or folklore are useful or appealing to their work, and the results of these interviews were used to guide the development of various attributes, controlled vocabularies, authority sources, and associated scope notes for an early-stage foundational schema.Master of Science in Library Scienc