Last fall, Kenton County Public Library (KCPL) hosted two virtual presentations featuring Library of Congress staff. Kenton County Public Library is the Connecting Communities Digital Initiative (CCDI)’s inaugural Libraries, Archives, Museums grantee. Their project, “Crafting Stories, Making History: The African American Experience in Covington, KY,” aims to highlight and preserve the experiences of residents from the historically Black Eastside neighborhood.
While at CCDI’s in-person Summer Fuse event in 2022, Ann Schoenenberger and her team met with Library staff in the American Folklife Center and the Local History and Genealogy division to learn additional strategies for unearthing Kentucky history from the Library’s collections. The team found the experience incredibly valuable and invited Library staff to present virtually to KCPL’s patrons.
Dr. Todd Harvey, a reference archivist in the American Folklife Center (AFC), and Karen Walfall, a reference librarian in the Local History and Genealogy division, shared methodologies researchers can follow to learn more about their local and family histories.
Video recordings of both webinars are available online. In this post, we share some of the highlights.
“Searching the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress”
Dr. Todd Harvey is a curator of the Alan Lomax Collection for AFC.
His presentation, “Searching the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress,” provided attendees with a sense of Library services available to patrons and methods for researching Kentucky-specific materials at the Library. Harvey discussed the history of AFC at length, noting that its roots go back to 1928 when the Archive of American Folk Song launched in the Library’s Music Division. He emphasized that the Center recognizes wisdom comes from the voices of ordinary people. Today, AFC has over 7 million original items about ordinary people talking about their lives through recipes, songs, and even animal husbandry!
Harvey said that “archival collections are messy,” but more in-depth tools like finding aids can help. Finding aids provide a detailed description of an archival collection, including the number of items, and other helpful information to help you navigate a collection.
Three tools and services essential to starting research at the Library were demonstrated: research appointments, Research and Reference Services, and Research Guides