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Posted by: Michelle Stefano
If this series is a mountain, I am pleased to say that we are now climbing up to its peak: an examination of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It is through the 2003 Convention that the concept and category …
Posted in: Intangible Cultural Heritage, WIPO
Posted by: John Fenn
This guest post from Todd Harvey, AFC reference staff member and Alan Lomax collection curator, is part of a short series related to the Library’s crowdsource platform and the campaign we helped launch in September 2019 focused on the extensive holdings AFC has of Lomax manuscript materials. The American Folklife Center wishes a happy birthday …
Posted in: Alan Lomax, Uncategorized
Posted by: Stephen Winick
A little before Christmas, I published a blog featuring the above image of the Royal Exchange in London, which is an important location in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. At the time I didn’t notice a tiny detail: one of the horse-drawn buses in the center of the frame has an advertisement on it for …
Posted in: Folksong
Posted by: John Fenn
In summer 2018, the AFC at the Library of Congress launched a paid internship opportunity as part of a program established through a generous gift from the late AFC staff member Peter Bartis (1949 – 2017). These positions introduced interns to the research collections at the AFC and the Library; helped develop critical skills related …
Posted in: Internship program
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Episode Fifteen of the Folklife Today Podcast (or Season 2, Episode 3) is ready for listening! Find it at this page on the Library’s website, or on iTunes, or with your usual podcatcher. Get your podcast here! In the episode, John Fenn, Thea Austen, and I look at classic songs about winter. In the podcast, we …
Posted by: Stephanie Hall
When I was writing my blog on “Great Lakes Ships and Shipping” in 2018, I naturally wanted to look at the field notes Alan Lomax wrote when he was collecting these songs. But this was no easy task. His field notes were online, but only as page image scans. The notes were handwritten and they …
Posted in: Alan Lomax
Posted by: John Fenn
At the start of this month we announced a “challenge” for the Lomax crowdsourcing campaign on the Library’s By the People platform. To refresh your memory, the campaign is focused on transcribing about 9000 pages of handwritten and typed Alan Lomax manuscripts. The ultimate goal is to create machine-readable electronic text versions of Lomax’s materials so …
Posted in: Alan Lomax
Posted by: John Fenn
Back in September, the American Folklife Center helped launch a crowdsourcing campaign focused on transcribing about 9000 pages of handwritten and typed Alan Lomax manuscripts. This campaign is running on By the People, the crowdsourcing platform developed by the Library of Congress. The ultimate goal is to create machine-readable electronic text versions of Lomax’s materials …
Posted in: Alan Lomax