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Archive: 2017 (13 Posts)

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Preparing the collection of a storytelling trailblazer

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 …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

StoryCorps interviews and the importance of keywords

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 …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

AFC accelerates its efforts to preserve analog media

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 …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

National Storytelling Festival photographer visits the Center

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 …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

The First Sound Recording of a Joke?

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 …