An archive signature refers to the archive catalogue. The signature is unique for each archive folder. In the Norwegian Folklore Archive, it is structured as follows: NFS collector, the number of the folder. The signature NFS Frimannslund 2, for example, refers to the second folder in the collection after Rigmor Frimannslund. In the Ethno-Folkloristic Archive, the signature is structured in the same way. EFA Hannaas 5 thus refers to folder five in the collection after Hannaas. In the Norwegian Ethnological Research, the collection is organized according to the questionnaire numbers. The individual questionnaire responses are also registered with a unique accession number, that is, a unique serial number assigned when they were received by the archive.

In folklore studies, an informant denotes the person who has told the tale written down in the documents - or in the case of questionnaires, the person who has responded and answered the questions.

[No English] Oppskrift er et synonym for nedtegnelse. I folkloristikken brukes det om en nedtegnelse av et kulturuttrykk, for eksempel et sagn, et eventyr, en vise eller en gåte.

Folklore record collections are manuscripts containing the folklore collectors' transcriptions from stories or songs performed by the storytellers and singers. Some of these manuscripts are written in notebooks, while others are written on loose sheets. These manuscripts are most often written during fieldwork, which means they may be hastily written, with rough handwriting. A folklore record collection may contain transcriptions from multiple fieldworks. The term ‘record collection’ also encompasses neatly written manuscripts based on fieldwork and submitted to a folklore archive.

The concept of genre is central to folklore studies. Genres are usually defined by a combination of form, content, and social function, and genre competence is often a premise for understanding the meaning of a cultural expression. In folklore studies, the understanding of genre is part of the analytical apparatus. At the same time, the folkloristic genre system has also been a way to systematize and catalogue the collected material. In SAMLA, this genre system is used as one of several ways to access the material. The list of genres is not exhaustive, but it covers the most important genres in the collections.

A very common method for obtaining knowledge of folk culture has been, and still is, questionnaires: they are lists of questions of a qualitative nature, which are sent out to informants around the country.

The responses to qualitative questionnaires are very heterogenous. To the same questions, some informants will respond with simple yes or no answers, while others give long continuous narratives.

Folklore is an orally transmitted culture and does not exist in any ‘correct’ version. Each individual tale exists only as a number of variants. Some variants have been written down by collectors and have found their way to samla.no. Certain stories are so similar to each other that they can be said to be of the same type. It is important to remember that a type does not actually exist in reality. Rather, a type is the sum of all variants of a story. A type is thus an abstraction. From the 19th century onwards, folklorists were aware that variants of the same tales existed over a large area, and the work of preparing a systematic catalogue of folktale types began. This catalogue was based on similarities in the narratives' structure and motifs. Later, catalogues of migratory legends and Nordic medieval ballads were prepared, based on the model from the folktale catalogue. In SAMLA we use these three type catalogues:

• Medieval Ballads: The Types of Scandinavian Ballads (TSB).
• Folktales: The Norwegian folktale catalogue, created by Ørnulf Hodne in 1984 from The Aarne-Thompson Index (AT).
• Migratory Legends: The Migratory Legends (ML), a catalogue of Norwegian migratory legends, created by Reidar Th. Christiansen, with additions by Inger Christiansen.