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Archive for the Archival Practice Category (29 posts)

South-Central Georgia Folklife Project Is Now Online

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Truck with peaches

Fruit stand in Ocilla, Georgia, ca. August 18, 1977. Photo by David Stanley.

This is a guest post by AFC folklorist Ann Hoog, who has been the division coordinator for a mass digitization and access project to reformat and make accessible online a large body of American Folklife Center field projects from the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s.

The American Folklife Center is pleased to announce a new online presentation of the South-Central Georgia Folklife Project collection. This collection is the third in a continuing series of online field survey collections released by the American Folklife Center in an initiative that began last year and will continue for several years to come.  Find the collection online at this link!

Between 1977 and 1997, AFC conducted approximately 25 ethnographic field projects and cultural surveys in various parts of the United States, resulting in a rich body of visual and aural documentation of our nation’s cultural heritage. In celebration of the AFC’s 40th anniversary in 2016, the Library is making these ethnographic collections available online to the public. By the time all these materials are online, they will total over a quarter million new items.

Sculpture of woman sitting

“Gold Star Mother,” from Mrs. Pope’s Museum, Pelham, Georgia. Photo by Carl Fleischhauer, ca. August 25, 1977. The residence once included more than 200 sculptures and reliefs created by Laura Pope Forrester. They were largely destroyed shortly after these photos were taken and no longer available for viewing.

The South-Central Georgia Folklife Project collection resulted from an ethnographic field project conducted in the summer of 1977 by the American Folklife Center and the Arts Experiment Station of Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia. The eight-county area chosen for the study is in the center of the “Wiregrass” region of Georgia.

This presentation includes approximately 376 sound recordings, 14,300 photographs, pen-and-ink drawings of vernacular architecture, and the logs and field notes that provide further details and context to the materials.

Rich and high-quality documentation includes hymn singing, fiddle and banjo music, vernacular architecture, quilts, boat building, occupations, foodways, jokes, and stories from the region.

Perhaps most striking is the visual documentation capturing the landscape and material culture that has changed dramatically in the past 40 years in the region of south-central Georgia.

Sketch of house

One of many pen-and-ink drawings created by Howard “Rusty” Marshall documenting vernacular house and barn types found in south-central Georgia.

This online presentation includes only the sound recordings, photographs and selected manuscripts in the collection. There are additional manuscripts, small publications, ephemera, planning documents and more available in AFC’s Research Center in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. A finding aid to the entire collection is available at this link. [See the note below.]

The American Folklife Center is excited to share these seminal field project collections more widely by making them available online. We hope you enjoy this cultural journey through the Georgia Wiregrass region!

Note: The permanent handle for the Finding Aid is [hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/eadafc.af014001]

A Q&A with new staff folklorist-archivist Kelly Revak

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Kelly Revak is a new processing archivist at the American Folklife Center. She has a master’s degree in folklore and a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. Cumulatively, she has 20 years of experience in archives, including 7 years in various capacities at the Berkeley Folklore Archive. Since starting her job […]

Nearly 300,000 Lomax documents now accessible online

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This is a guest post by the American Folklife Center’s Alan Lomax curator Todd Harvey. Fans of folk music fire up your browsers! The second—and largest—phase of the Lomax family papers has just gone online at this link. This set of manuscripts joins ca. 25,000 items that went online last fall. Researchers now have access to nearly […]

Finding aid to Eleanor Dickinson fieldwork collection now online

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The following is a guest post from AFC processing archivist Marcia Segal. The remarkable audio and video recordings in the Eleanor Dickinson collection (AFC 1970/001), recorded circa 1969-1980, capture a moment in time in the years before the Internet and other technological developments changed the way people communicate. The immediacy of religious services, (uninterrupted by […]

Native American Heritage Month News: AFC’s Judith Gray is an “Honored One”

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Judith Gray received the prestigious 2016 Honored One Award from the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums (ATALM), at its annual conference in October. In Judith’s own words, the honor represents one of the most ”deeply significant moments” in her career, which is saying a lot, given the impressive range of her accomplishments to date. Detailing […]

The American Folklife Center: 40 Years of Change

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The following post is part of a series of blog posts about the 40th Anniversary Year of the American Folklife Center. Visit this link to see them all! This year the Library’s American Folklife Center (AFC) turns 40. Detailed histories of AFC are available elsewhere [1], so we thought we’d do something different in this […]

Hundreds of new terms added to the Ethnographic Thesaurus

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This is a guest post by Catherine H. Kerst, an American Folklife Center cataloger who oversees the American Folklore Society Ethnographic Thesaurus. In January 2016, a new version (2.2) of the American Folklore Society Ethnographic Thesaurus was posted to the Library of Congress’s linked data site. With this update, we added hundreds of subject terms, and […]

Unpacking the collection of a ’60s New York City folk music stalwart

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This is a guest post by Maya Lerman, processing archivist at the American Folklife Center. She will be writing occasional guest posts as she makes discoveries during the processing of the Izzy Young Collection. In November 2015 the American Folklife Center acquired Izzy Young’s collection, including its rich manuscripts, journals, scrapbooks, photographs, and recordings. Israel Goodman […]

Descriptions of 10,000+ Brazilian Chapbooks at AFC now Online

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This is a guest blog post by Margaret Kruesi, a folklorist and cataloger at the American Folklife Center. You have a new opportunity to discover 10,000 plus titles in the American Folklife Center’s Literatura de cordel Brazilian chapbook collection (AFC 1970/002)! The Library of Congress holds one of the world’s largest collections of literatura de […]