29th April, 2026
Added a feature where if you use the Zotero web plugin you can use it when you're reading a narrative to properly bookmark the reference within Zotero.

Added a featrure to download a RIS file.

Fixed a couple of minor bugs.

Now added/updated 400 motifs out of approximatley 3,250.

24th April, 2026
It has been a while since we've noted any updates, although we have been adding and correcting entries. But now we have some great news...

We have a new process of fixing entries, and we will focus on the Berezkin Analytical Catalogue first. Here we are seeing a 20% increase in narrative accuracy, 20% more traditions being mapped per narrative, and bibliographical data now being accurately represented.
This is a huge piece of work costing thousands of dollars, and so I want to thank all of those who support this through the Patreon channel @crecganford. Thank you.

This work is expected to take 6 months or so to complete, and we will roll it out one motif at a time. Once complete we will update all the mythemes.

15th September, 2025
The last few weeks have been spent improving the aesthetics of the site and adding instructions.
The Mytheme n-Occurrence solution has been updated to allow users to search for multiple mythemes, including "wild cards". This should enhance folklore narrative searching significantly.
Fixed an error where the semantic confidence value in the individual mytheme search was not always working as intended.
The next few weeks will be focused on improving data quality.

26th August, 2025
A number of people complained about the length of time it took to load a narrative due to mytheme similarity searching. This has now been turned off by default, and you can now click a button by the mythemes in the narrative to load a page that includes similarities.

24th August, 2025
The Mythology and Folklore Database has had some significant changes which have gone live today:

1) Search for Mythemes: Allows a search for mythemes, for narratives that contain those mythemes, and, for academic users and supporters of this work, the ability to identify narratives with similar mythemes. This later feature is a signifciant tool in the toolkit of a folklorist is search of "similar" narratives.
2) Over 100,000 narratives have had data quality issues fixed, including tradition and bibliographical information. The correction and maintenance of these will continue to be an on-going task.
3) All users now have access to Advanced search, which is now the default search, although non-academics and supporters of the channel will have limits to search results due to the costs of running this service.
4) Semantic Search: The Advanced Search also introduces semantic searching, again another very useful tool for folklorists, and allows a greater number of relevant narratives to be included within search results which may have otherwised been missed out in previous versions of this tool.

These features may have some issues over the first week or so of use, as any bugs are found and fixed, so please bare with me.

7th July, 2025
The Mytheme creation has been completed, at around 210,000 using new techniques. However, this is still too many, and a process of consolidating them is now happening. We currently have approximately 165,000 and will futher consolidate until obvious redundancy in mythemes is removed. Additional narratives are being added by testers of the Submit a Narrative function. We are looking at various books from First Nation American, African, and Australian stories in the first batch of new narratives. We have introduced a CSV download function to the advanced search option, and this is being tweaked, to control the output you receive.

30th July, 2025
Over 35,000 data entry mistakes have been corrected this week. Fixed a bug in the motif comparison page showing incorrect locations. There are now over 150,000 mythemes in the database, covering about 50% of the narratives. Testing has begun on finding narratives with similar mythemes, allowing easier searching of similar stories. Testing will begin on how best to consolidate the mythemes into categories, to allow for easier searching. Testing has begun on the tools to add your own narratives.

21st July, 2025
The database now has 75,000 mythemes, to allow further testing. Semantic search is being tested to a limited audience based on Berezkin entries. Fixed a bug that showed search returns in its own scrollable window.

19th July, 2025
Added 50,000 mythemes, to allow further testing.

17th July, 2025
Added 70 new motifs. Added 10000+ new narratives. These next changes are in Beta and will be seen by Patreons, Members, and some academics: Added ATU Tale Types - More to be done here as just testing functionality Added Mythemes metadata - More to be done, only 5% of narratives covered Added metadata search to allow author's names and traditions to be found Added a option to turn off the map as this increases the speed that reports are rendered

7th July, 2025
Added 120 new motifs. Improved the search for Patreons, Members, and Acacdemics: Logic is not allowed in searches, along with the facility to increase or restrict the scope of search to particular data sets, or to include searching the metadata of the narratives.

2nd July, 2025
Removed duplicate entries that had crept in due to the individual narrative work. Added a Bibliography section on the Side Menu. Clarified button usage for search. Introduced a more robust method of understanding if a user is an academic. This enabled hundreds of users to experience a better service.

25th June, 2025
Removed duplicate search results. Reintroduced auditing to help prevent AI scraping or misuse of database. Added a clustering view on maps to help identify tradition groupings. Fixed various bugs introduced with the new look and feel.

January to June, 2025
Allowed narratives to be individually searched. Added 240 new motifs. Added 6000 new mythological narratives. Corrected and updated over 3000 existing narratives. Updated the look and feel of the site to allow services to be more easily accessed.

30th December, 2024
We have manually corrected several thousand formatting errors, and have plans to correct a few thousand more. This is in preperation for a major update in the coming months.
There were also two major errors found, one in H41 in Bantu-speaking Africa, and the whole of L73a. These have now been corrected.

17th October, 2024
A major bug meant that users who were banned for overuse were never allowed back onto the system, this is now fixed.
Added percentage splits to the motif comparison page, and fixed a few minor bugs, and tweaked the UI a little in places.

30th September, 2024
Trying to tidy up the UI, using icons and more consistent headings to provide a better user experience.

29th September, 2024
We have implemented the automatic calculation/display of the top 10 most similar motif distributions to the motif you are looking at. This should aid understanding similarly aged myths, or myths told by similar cultures.
Also added are region headings to the myth data so when they are displayed you have a better idea of the region the tradition is located in.
Plus a few other minor bug fixes.

28th September, 2024
Over the last 10 days there have been massive changes, with the implementation of compulsory logon, but also the implementation of auditing, and many minor bug fixes.

18th September, 2024
Two new features have been added. First, below each section in the Berezkin Catalogue is the ability to get a citation which you can paste into a papers you are writing regarding the motif being researched. And the second feature is under "Berezkin Motif List" which now has a table of categories, and if you select one of these you will go to the first entry in the list of that grouping.
There are other minor bug fixes on top of this.

16th September, 2024
Submotif dispersals can now be seen, along with various bug fixes to improve the general well-being of the site.
Changed the color scheme, to allow easier reading and to be more compliant with web standards, also fixed a couple of minor code version issues.

6th September, 2024
Updated how the results of a search look with a better breakdown of Folktales due to future changes around folktale categorization, and tweaked the Motif List. Continuing to improve the underlying code with many minor bug fixes and efficencies. The tabs should be using less memory in your browser compared to a couple of weeks ago.
Changed the color scheme, to allow easier reading and to be more compliant with web standards, also fixed a couple of minor code version issues.

1st September, 2024
Added around 20 new books, primary source material on Roman and Greek history.
Changed the color scheme, to allow easier reading and to be more compliant with web standards, also fixed a couple of minor code version issues.

1st August, 2024
Changed the markers on the map to be smaller, and added a "Compare Motif Dispersals" feature, so you can compare side by side the dispersal patterns of two different motifs.

26th July, 2024
Added new mapping interface, which is faster and cheaper, meaning the mapping features are now available to everyone.

23rd July, 2024
Added 200+ new motifs, improved geographic data with 10 new locations, added two new classifications for all motifs which can be seen via the Motif Categorisation option under the main title of the page.

11th July, 2024
Added another 1200 new Folktales to the database.

6th July, 2024
Added approximately 800 new Folktales to the database.

3rd July, 2024
MAJOR IMPROVEMENT: Search now returns better results, esepcially around Folklore. This will mean the results will need to be displayed differently in future, and so this will be one of the next changes.

26th June, 2024
BUG FIX: Removed the use of pollyfill.io from CDN following security alert from Google.

18th June, 2024
BUG FIX: Sometimes folktales would not be displayed if metadata was corrupt. This is now fixed.

12th June, 2024
Improved the Bibliography page, corrected encoding problems, and provided an index, and ensured all names were alphabeticised.

28th May, 2024
Further enhancements to the UI allowing Data Sources and Geography (if you are a full user) to be filtered on searches. These options are under the search bar, and will expand when you click on them, making the UI much cleaner in general use.

27th May, 2024
It's been a busy year, but starting to work on this again.

Updated the UI to be cleaner.
Added a feature for "Full Users" to search the Berezkin's Database by geographic region

In the coming months I'm looking to add user ID, supporting resources, and various fixes and updates, including enhanced search options.

12th January, 2023
Added around 450 Fairy Tales from the compilation of Fairy Books by Andrew Lang

10th January, 2023
There were some issues with chapter refrences not displaying in search results, this is now fixed. Added The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homeric Hymns, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the Mabinogion to the database. More classic texts will be added soon.

28th December, 2022
Manually corrected approximately 500 entries today, fixing false positive location results. There is still much work to do here, with perhaps 1,200 more entries requiring attention, and with over 5,000 motif location references not currently recognised, and perhaps even expanding the locations availble to search. This should not affect any research if you are using the text information, however the maps for these entries will now probably have many less entries. This will be a massive effort to fix, but this is being worked on.

27th December, 2022
Fixed a bug where the hyperlinks to the original Berezkin Database format stopped working.

26th December, 2022
Access to the Database is now restricted to Patreons, and academics, where their use continues to be free.
Please email access@crecganford.com if you wish to gain access to this. Many thanks.

21st December, 2022
We now can search for a string "some words" or for the instance of "some" and "words", to search for the words to be sequential place quotes around the search string.

18th December, 2022
We now seperate the results in the Berezkin's Database into their appropriate catagories, and so are now shown in reference order

8th December, 2022
Added a new option, under the search bar, to view the Crecganford/Berezkin database. This is dynamically produced as opposed to being a translation of the original russian site. This will eventually allow more interesting analysis to be carried out on objects within this database.

Also added some folktales about Widows, and Willow the Wisps.

7th December, 2022
Changed the format of the Berezkin Search results, removing the preview text as it was considered limited in value, but now ordering the results in alpha-numerical order based on the index reference. There was also a bug that showed duplicate entries in the Berezkin results, this has now been fixed.

3rd Decemember, 2022
Added over 100 new folklore entries covering frogs, werewolfs, and other oddities. Also corrected regional data for around 1,000 entries in the Berezkin Database.

2nd December, 2022
Added over 800 folktales, including over 100 tales from the Brothers Grimm to the database.