As I have mentioned several times on this blog, the 100th birthday of Alan Lomax is fast approaching. We’ll be celebrating the birthday itself with an exhibit, and then extending our celebrations throughout the year. However, today I thought it might be fun to show you that we’ve already gotten a jump on our celebrations …
Back in our 100th blog post, I mentioned some of our upcoming ideas for celebrating the 100th birthday of Alan Lomax (1915-2002). The birthday will take place on January 31, but our plans last all year! These plans are developing and firming up, so I’ll take this opportunity to fill you in. First, though, I’ll …
There’s been a new discovery and new research into Alan Lomax’s fieldwork in the 1930s! On the John W. Kluge Center’s blog Insights, Antony Stewart, British Research Council Fellow at The Kluge Center, describes a notebook recently discovered by AFC’s Alan Lomax curator, Todd Harvey. The notebook was used by Lomax during his 1936-1937 field …
Ever since the Civil Rights History Project Act was passed in 2009, archivists at the American Folklife Center have kept their eyes and ears open for items related to the Southern Freedom Movement as they process collections. Todd Harvey, curator of the Alan Lomax Collection (AFC 2004/004), recently noticed a folder of twenty-one photographs in …
The following is a guest post from Bertram Lyons, the digital assets manager and a folklife specialist at the American Folklife Center’s archives at the Library of Congress. This post originally appeared on the Association for Cultural Equity site and is reposted with permission. Prior to his arrival at the Library, Lyons was the archivist at the …
The following is a guest post by Aimee Hess, Library of Congress Publishing Office, and Todd Harvey, American Folklife Center. The American Folklife Center, in collaboration with the Library of Congress Publishing Office, has recently published Michigan-I-O: Alan Lomax and the 1938 Library of Congress Folk-Song Expedition, a digital publication containing text, images, music, and …
The "Great Folk Scare" of the 1930s-1950s had few surnames more prominent than Guthrie, Lomax, or Seeger. They were multi-generational families who today continue to practice folk music and illuminate tradition bearers. The American Folklife Center holds archival collections documenting these families and so we have produced guides to aid research access. This blog post explains and introduces the new guides.
The American Folklife Center’s partnership with the Association for Cultural Equity dates from the Library’s acquisition of the Alan Lomax collection in 2004. The partnership focuses on creating access to and awareness of Lomax Family collections. The following is a conversation between Todd Harvey and Nathan Salsburg, respective curators from the American Folklife Center (AFC) …
"ETL" is a wonderful acronym, a non-word, a nickname for a phrase by which insiders describe a complex process. ETL in the context of digital collections at the Library of Congress is short for "extract, transform, and load." To a curator working with crowdsourced archival material. "ETL" in an email subject line signals the final step in a process by which an archival collection becomes full-text searchable, the gold standard for access to manuscript materials. In this post we look at the ways in which crowdsourced transcriptions add depth to our understanding of our rich fieldwork collections. We look at a variety of materials, including Alan Lomax's trips to collect traditional songs and music in Florida and Haiti. We show how Zora Neale Hurston's fieldwork informed her brilliant novel "Their Eyes Were Watching God," providing excerpts from fieldnotes that comport with descriptions in the novel.
