Nicki Saylor is head of the American Folklife Center Archive at the Library of Congress. She leads a team of archivists, ethnomusicologists and folklorists who curate multiformat collections that document folk culture from around the world, from the earliest field recordings made in the 1890s on wax cylinder through born-digital collections such as StoryCorps. The AFC Archive is the nation’s oldest and largest archives of ethnographic documentation, including folk songs, stories, and other creative expressions of people from diverse communities. Saylor served as head of Digital Research & Publishing at the University of Iowa Libraries from 2007-2012. She has also worked in a public library and a regional humanities center devoted to the languages and cultures of the Upper Midwest since earning her M.A. in Library and Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004. She worked for a decade as a journalist at metropolitan newspapers throughout the Midwest.
Most Recent Posts
- Vast folk music festival collection now described online July 1st, 2020
- “Doing Something Useful:” A Tribute to AFC’s longtime volunteer, Howard Kramer June 1st, 2020
- Bess Lomax Hawes Digital Collection Launches April 22nd, 2020
- Ready for research: Documentation of Southern pottery, Southeast Asian cultures, and Armenian folk crafts March 24th, 2020
- Brooklyn Rediscovered through 1980s Documentation February 25th, 2019
- Collection of music and dance from New York immigrant groups now available for research September 19th, 2018
- Memory XFR offers a chance to learn about digitizing family memories captured on tape, slides or video August 15th, 2018
- Collections documenting cultures in Brazil, the Sudan region, New Mexico and California are now richly described online June 18th, 2018
- No ordinary banjo April 12th, 2018
- Former Latvian president sings music from an AFC fieldwork collection February 16th, 2018