The study examines the problems and possibilities in the digitisation of national folklore archives and collections in the wider context of digital humanities and the archiving strategies in folkloristics. The primary goal of the study is to present a problem-oriented and critical overview of the available digital databases containing folklore texts (WossiDiA, Sagragrunnur, ETKSpace, Danish Folklore Nexus, Nederlandse VolksverhalenBank, The Schools’ Collection etc.), and of the analyses conducted on these, using computational methods. After a concise historical introduction of European folklore archives, the study first presents the historical reasons behind the concepts of folklore databases’ contents (genre-centred; collector, and collection-centred approach), followed by the practical, technical, and theoretical aspects of digital content creation (crowdsourcing, markup languages, TEI, digital critical editions etc.). The study then takes a look at the new digital tools and methods applied in the analysis of digitised folklore texts (text-mining, network theory methods, data visualisation), and finally sums up the theoretical foundations of databases and computational folkloristics.