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

Music and Dance collections at the American Folklife Center

Posted by: Todd Harvey

Music and dance have such prevalence in American Folklife Center collections that, appropriately, we announce guides to these cultural expressions in the same Folklife Today post. The resource guides “Music in the United States” and “Dance” provide descriptive access to more than 1000 AFC collections. Music and dance are intangible cultural expressions that lend themselves …

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

More Haitian Voices: The Rigaud collection finding aid goes online

Posted by: Todd Harvey

This guest post was authored by Marcia K. Segal, an archivist at the American Folklife Center who processed and authored the finding aid to the collection she describes below. Melville Herskovits, Alan Lomax, and Laura Boulton – three notable collectors, whose recordings of religious expression in Haiti are among the collections at the American Folklife …

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

ETL: Searching the Lomax family papers through the magic of crowdsourcing

Posted by: Todd Harvey

"ETL" is a wonderful acronym, a non-word, a nickname for a phrase by which insiders describe a complex process. ETL in the context of digital collections at the Library of Congress is short for "extract, transform, and load." To a curator working with crowdsourced archival material. "ETL" in an email subject line signals the final step in a process by which an archival collection becomes full-text searchable, the gold standard for access to manuscript materials. In this post we look at the ways in which crowdsourced transcriptions add depth to our understanding of our rich fieldwork collections. We look at a variety of materials, including Alan Lomax's trips to collect traditional songs and music in Florida and Haiti. We show how Zora Neale Hurston's fieldwork informed her brilliant novel "Their Eyes Were Watching God," providing excerpts from fieldnotes that comport with descriptions in the novel.