Top of page
Posted by: Nicole Saylor
This is a guest blog post by Kaitlin Dotson, who did an internship at the American Folklife Center this summer. She was recently hired as a processing assistant at the Hargrett Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia’s Special Collections Libraries. As an intern at the American Folklife Center (AFC), I spent …
Posted in: Archival Practice
Posted by: Nicole Saylor
This post is an adaptation of my keynote address to the American Folklore Society’s pre-conference on folklore archiving, “Adventures in Folklore Archiving,” Oct. 16, 2017 in Minneapolis, MN. I was out at a DC party recently and was asked the classic DC party question: “What do you do for a living?” My answer was that I …
Posted in: Archival Practice
Posted by: Nicole Saylor
This is a guest post from Julia Kim, Digital Assets Specialist at the American Folklife Center. This Thanksgiving, StoryCorps invites everyone to take part in The Great Listen, a national movement that empowers young people–and people of all ages–to create an oral history of the contemporary United States by recording an interview with an elder …
Posted in: Acquisitions, StoryCorps
Posted by: Nicole Saylor
This is a guest post by American Folklife Center archivist Maya Lerman. Staff in the American Folklife Center archive finished a project that will improve our efficiency in preserving and making accessible AFC’s rich audiovisual collections. Like audiovisual archives everywhere, AFC is working to prepare for a time when obsolescence and degradation of physical media will greatly hinder preservation efforts. We …
Posted in: Alan Lomax, Archival Practice
Posted by: Nicole Saylor
This is a guest blog post from AFC archivist Maya Lerman. We would like to announce the release of the Izzy Young collection finding aid. As you may have read in our series about the collection, the Izzy Young collection documents the late-1950s and 1960s folk revival through the eyes of Israel Goodman Young, founder …
Posted in: Acquisitions, Archival Practice, Folk Music, Old Time Music
Posted by: Nicole Saylor
This is a guest post by Todd Harvey, acquisitions coordinator and folklife specialist at the American Folklife Center. Fifteen years ago, a moving van carrying four tons of archival material documenting the National Storytelling Festival arrived at the Library of Congress in the largest single acquisition the American Folklife Center has yet undertaken. The National …
Posted in: Acquisitions
Posted by: Nicole Saylor
This is a guest post by American Folklife Center archivist Kelly Revak. I’ve recently joined the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress as an archivist. One of my first tasks was to catalog Jesse Walter Fewkes’s Passamaquoddy recordings as a part of the Ancestral Voices project team. Made in 1890, these recordings are …
Posted in: Archival Practice
Posted by: Nicole Saylor
This is a guest blog post by American Folklife Center archivist Marcia Segal. In the business of processing a collection – from the earliest stages of unpacking and assessment, to the point when researchers can access the contents, in physical or digital form – there comes a moment when a processor becomes the advocate for a …
Posted in: Archival Practice, Women's History
Posted by: Nicole Saylor
This is a guest post by Todd Harvey, a folklife specialist and acquisitions coordinator at the American Folklife Center. John Cohen stopped by the other day to look at some photographs. Since the Library acquired John’s multi-format collection in 2011, we have gladly hosted his periodic visits. Here is a man who first walked through …
Posted in: AFC History, Fieldwork, John Cohen, Photographs