The National Folklore Archives Initiative (NFAI), an effort by the American Folklore Society to document and provide access to folklore archival collections, recently received a second round of funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Earlier funding in 2011-2013 resulted in the creation of the Folklore Collections Database (FCD), a stable framework hosted …
Today we celebrate the official release of StoryCorps.me, a global platform where anyone in the world can record and upload an oral history interview. This effort is a wish come true for StoryCorps founder Dave Isay, the 2015 recipient of the TED Prize. The prize comes with $1 million to invest in a powerful idea. Dave’s was to create …
This is a guest post by American Folklife Center’s Judith Gray, an ethnomusicologist who curates the largest body of early recordings of indigenous American songs and stories recorded in the United States. After all the identifying, rehousing, cataloging, labeling, barcoding, and databasing activity on the part of AFC staff over the past year, the actual …
Judith Gray, a specialist in Native American cultures, has been spending a lot of quality time down in the chilly decks of the Library’s Jefferson building lately. She curates the largest body of early recordings of indigenous American music and stories in the United States contained on nearly ten thousand wax cylinders. When not on …
This is a guest blog post by folklife specialist Catherine Hiebert Kerst. The photos are by Stephen Winick for AFC. For anyone who missed the September, 2013 Cultural Heritage Archives: Networks, Innovation, & Collaboration Symposium hosted by the American Folklife Center, or anyone who wants to revisit it, the full webcast is online at the …
In April, Maryland Traditions, a program of the Maryland State Arts Council (MSAC), transferred its archives to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Sustainability of folklore fieldwork collections is a pressing issue for many state folk arts agencies throughout the United States. I recently had the opportunity to talk with state folklorist Clifford Murphy about …
The following is a guest post from Trevor Owens, Digital Archivist in the Office of Strategic Initiatives. Trevor has been consulting with the American Folklife Center on born-digital collection development initiatives. I have recently had the pleasure of helping to develop and curate the American Folklife Center’s digital culture web archive. Nicki Saylor announced this …
This is a guest post from Lotus Norton-Wisla, an intern at the American Folklife Center working to improve access to materials in the Alan Lomax Collection related to choreometrics, which was Lomax’s methodology for studying dance performance style. These materials consist of more than 70 boxes of paper materials and more than 3,500 film elements. …
This is a guest post from John Vallier, Head, Distributed Media at the University of Washington Libraries. His post is based on a presentation he made at an American Folklife Center symposium held at the Library of Congress last fall. This past September I had the pleasure of participating in the American Folklife Center’s Cultural Heritage Archives …
