From late December 2012 through early June 2021, Nicole Saylor led a team of archivists, ethnomusicologists and folklorists that curates the nation’s largest ethnographic archives. She worked to preserve the American Folklife Center’s collecting legacy while accelerating the transformation of an already well-established archives for the digital age. She recently took a position at the Library as the Chief of the Digital Innovation Lab, a position established to lead the Library’s innovation with digital collections and to support its digital transformation. As she began her new position, we interviewed her about her time at AFC.
Out of an abundance of caution due to COVID-19, all Library of Congress buildings and facilities are closed to the public, and American Folklife Center staff are currently teleworking. In such uncertain times, we wanted to reassure our followers on social media, as well as those who use our collections and services in other ways, that we remain committed to serving the public as fully and as long as we can. Although most of us on the American Folklife Center staff have been staying away from our beloved Jefferson and Adams Buildings, we are on the job! In this blog, you'll find all the ways you can connect with us and enjoy our collections while you're staying safe at home.
The NAMES Project Foundation (NPF) today announced that the National AIDS Memorial will become the new caretaker of the AIDS Memorial Quilt and NAMES Project programs. As part of the transition, the NAMES Project and the National AIDS Memorial have agreed to jointly gift care and stewardship of The Quilt’s archival collections to the prestigious American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, making this collection available through the world’s largest public library.
The following is a guest post by Jennifer Cutting. Continuing on the momentum set by the American Folklife Center’s symposium Women Documenting the World: Women as Folklorists, Ethnomusicologists & Fieldworkers (September 26, 2019), we’d like to showcase some women ethnographers who are very close to home. This blog post takes a scrapbook-style look at photographs …
The following is a guest post from Tom Rankin, a member of the AFC Board of Trustees. A folklorist and photographer, Tom is Director of Duke University’s MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts, and was formerly the Director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke. Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi, who held his seat from …
This is a guest blog post by Carl Fleischhauer. It presents a version of the talk he gave at our Alan Jabbour tribute event earlier this year. It has been edited for presentation in this blog. These remarks are about Alan Jabbour as founding director of the American Folklife Center: his thinking, activities at the …
On January 18, 2018, AFC sponsored a special event in our Benjamin Botkin Folklife Lecture Series. Alan Jabbour, 1942 – 2017: His Legacy in Folklife and Traditional Music brought together speakers who worked closely with Alan to examine the contributions he made during his career to cultural documentation, the promotion of traditional music, and …
Note: the following is a guest post by our colleague Kate Stewart, former AFC archivist and former Folklife Today blogger. If you have a memory of Peter to share, please do so in the comments on the blog post at this link. In the spring of 2011, I had just begun learning the ropes of working at …
The American Folklife Center is very sad to report the death of our longtime staff member, Peter Bartis. Peter died on December 25, 2017, from cancer. He had been in hospice for several days, with his spouse Ben, his brother Jim, and several AFC staff members visiting him daily. At the time of his retirement …
