The FMA are the largest university folklore archives in Greece and among the most important folklore archives in the country. Their mission, stated in their Constitution, is “to support educational and research needs relating to the subject of Folklore, and its application to the study of folk culture in Greek society and in the Greek diaspora. They will make accessible material relating to the documentation of folk culture, as well as archival material deriving from their collections and from a continually updated digital data bank.” The FMA possess musical recordings, photographs and microfilms, documents dating to the 18th - 20th centuries and about 4,000 files of ethnographic and oral folklore material, mostly manuscripts, derived from fieldwork undertaken by students of the Department of Philology and of other Departments of the School of Philosophy as part of their study of folklore. These manuscripts, bound in ca 700 volumes and containing over 350,000 pages, contain first-hand information on various aspects of Greek traditional life, such as material culture, religion, rituals and customs of the life and annual cycles, oral literature and oral history, and social life, recorded in the idiom used by informants.  Most of them were compiled by students who originated from the communities described and they contain information and interpretations available only to locals, so being especially valuable for the study of Greek folklore and ethnography.

A specialized Archive of Autobiographies of Folk Poets, Singers, Dancers, and Other Artists (such as painters), comprising over fifty life narratives by such folk artists,  was established in 2010 by Georgios Thanopoulos, former Assistant Professor of Folklore. The Folklore manuscript Collection has held a wide range of manuscripts as regards the language and ethnocultural features of the groups researched: among the pre-2007 manuscripts one comes across ethnographic accounts from various ethnocultural groups such as refugees and their descendants from Asia Minor, Gypsies, Greek Cypriots, and accounts of people from other parts of the world, such as Germany, Japan, France, Kenya, Egypt, Zair, Ethiopia, Russia, and Romania. In 2011 a specialized Archive of Life Narratives of Migrants, Refugees and Diaspora Greeks was created by Vassiliki Chryssanthopoulou as part of the FMA. It contains over fifty life narratives recorded by postgraduate and undergraduate students – proof of changes both in the subject matter of folklore and of Greek society itself. 

The FMA founder, Spyridakis, determined that the University archives of folklore were also to include the following categories of objects as distinct archives: the microfilm archive, containing some 13,700 microphotographs mostly of magical and medicinal nature deriving from 17c-19c Cretan manuscripts; the music archive, containing old recordings of folk songs and music on magnetic tapes, recorded by students; the legal documents archive, containing legal documents pertaining to customary law, such as dowry certificates, wills, bills of sale, loan and lease, etc., often included in the students’ manuscripts; the photograph archive, made up of photographs also included in the students’ manuscripts; and a museum collection of objects today numbering ca 1,100 items, relating to material culture, to folk art, and to social and spiritual life, mostly donated by students or by other donors. The Folklore Collection has been digitized and is partly available to readers through the digital repository of the University of Athens, Pergamos.