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Category: Archival Practice

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

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

Posted by: Nicole Saylor

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 …

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

Acquiring at digital scale: Harvesting the StoryCorps.me collection

Posted by: Nicole Saylor

Thanks to The Great Thanksgiving Listen, the StoryCorps collection of interviews has doubled! Since the launch of StoryCorps.me mobile app in March, more than 68,000 interviews have been uploaded as of today—the vast majority of them in the few days following Thanksgiving. The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress is the archival home …

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

Lomax Family Manuscripts Go Online

Posted by: Stephen Winick

The following is a guest post from Todd Harvey, the curator of the Alan Lomax Collection at the American Folklife Center archive, Library of Congress. The American Folklife Center today announces the online publication of the Lomax Family manuscripts. This phased project begins today, with access to 25,000 pages created primarily by Alan Lomax during …

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

New funds help Folklore Society make visible more folklore collections

Posted by: Nicole Saylor

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 …

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

Moving Day and a Major Anniversary

Posted by: Nicole Saylor

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 …

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

Preparing thousands of the earliest ethnographic recordings on wax cylinders for transfer to the National Audio-visual Conservation Center

Posted by: Nicole Saylor

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 …

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

Webcast of Cultural Heritage Archives Symposium Online

Posted by: Nicole Saylor

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 …