The Research Collections of the IESA SAS include extensive textual, pictorial, and multimedia documents. In addition to rare materials collected by our staff in the process of field research, they contain a rich collection of photographs and drawings; folk customary material from the questionnaire survey of the Ethnographic Department of Matica Slovenská (1942); a unique collection of folk tales compiled under the direction of F. Wollman; questionnaire material of the Ethnographic Atlas of Slovakia; the controversial and currently inaccessible Inheritance of the Beraneks spouses; specialised collections of ballads, proverbs, and other folk genres.

At present, we place special scientific research and application emphasis on digital archiving and digital humanities. Within the IDS, we coordinate the membership of the IESA SAS as a cooperating partner in the DARIAH-EU European research infrastructure. In our activities, we follow open science, open data, and open software strategies to the largest extent possible. We also organise networking activities for individuals and institutions with a focus on digital research in humanities in Slovakia.

We are currently digitising our Collection of research reports, which contains over 1,500 documents from the ethnological and anthropological field and other research (a total of 120,000 units in various formats) and are preparing a digital archive system for its online publication. The technological infrastructure of the department is equipped with professional scanning devices, sufficient server capacity, internal NAS storage, as well as other necessary technical equipment.