In the wake of the SOPA/PIPA protests, debate over the Research Works Act, the growing boycott of Elsevier by scholars in many fields, and more local discussions of the ways that various scholarly societies in my own fields of interest (anthropology, folklore studies) responded to the recent call by the [U.S.] White House Office of Science and Technology Policy for comment on public access to federally funded research, there is a great deal of additional attention being given to the changing nature of the scholarly communications (publishing) system and our hopes for its future.

One key issue centers on scholarly society publishing programs and how they can best be advanced in the present and into the future. At the 2011 American Anthropological Association meetings I spoke in two different contexts about these issues. I have shared here previously my remarks to the “Future of AAA Publishing” event (Jackson 2011b; for context, see Nichols and Schmid 2011 and Brown 2011). That presentation was on “Green Open Access Practices.”

I also spoke in the Digital Anthropologies: Projects and Projections panel organized by Mike and Kim Fortun and sponsored by the Society for Cultural Anthropology. In that event (which has been well documented by Daniel Lende (2011), my goal was to describe the Open Folklore project as both a broader community effort and as a specific digital platform, so as to illustrate a more general point about the fruitful possibilities that can come from direct partnerships between libraries and the library community and scholarly societies.

Libraries and scholarly societies now have a customer-to-business relationship and it is one that is growing ever more strained as commercial publishers become central partners in many scholarly society publishing programs. I evoked the alter-globalization motto Another World is Possible in my title because I wanted to suggest that the course that we are on is not the only one available to us. I believe, on the basis of a lot of time spent over the past five years with university librarians around the Midwestern U.S., that the research library community would much rather work with scholarly societies collaboratively in the shared real and digital spaces in which scholars and librarians (and students) already labor together rather than engage antagonistically in a neoliberal marketplace that has been shaped by the business practices pioneered by firms such as Elsevier, Springer and (yes) Wiley-Blackwell. Open Folklore is just one of many university-scholarly society partnerships that are exploring how to make this alternative framework real.

I should have just shared my presentation at the time of the AAA meetings, but I had hope that I could quickly work on it some more before getting it into wider circulation. Time has not been available for that work, but the current interest in these issues suggests that I might now have an interested audience and a second chance to share it below in the form that I presented it in Montreal.

My remarks below should not be taken as an official statement of the Open Folklore project team, the Indiana University Libraries, or the American Folklore Society. They reflect my own experience with these issues, although they of course also draw upon the rich experiences that I have had partnering with talented, committed colleagues working toward the goal of achieving Open Folklore’s aspirations. The paper below has been edited lightly just to recontextualize the language for a reader not at the original panel (meaning simple removal of language like, “so and so will probably speak later this morning about…”). I wish to take this opportunity to especially thank Mike and Kim Fortun for their remarkable service to the field as editors of Cultural Anthropology and as organizers of the Digital Anthropology event.

Another World is Possible: Open Folklore as Library-Scholarly Society Partnership

Jason Baird Jackson

Indiana University

Building upon shared values, facing common problems, and recognizing new opportunities, partnerships linking scholars, scholarly societies, and research libraries are a particularly hopeful development in the changing scholarly communication system. In my remarks, and as an example of current possibilities, I will quickly describe the Open Folklore project and situate it in the context of the serials crisis, the corporate enclosure of society journal programs, the erosion of the university press system, the development of open source software for scholarly communication, and the rise of the open access movement as a progressive response to these changes. For those wanting basic information on using Open Folklore associated resources in your research and teaching, I urge you to visit the Open Folklore Portal site online and to consult the instructional screencasts that my collaborators and I have shared there, and on YouTube.

By way of introduction, I can note that OF is a joint project of the American Folklore Society and the Indiana University Bloomington (IUB) Libraries. The two lead partners share as desire to make more reliable folklore scholarship—in many genres—discoverable and freely available online.  The Open Folklore team is doing this work but so are many colleagues in many places. Consulting the Open Folklore website, which I will come to in a moment, provides an eye-opening and encouraging sense of the OA work that a wide and deep network of folklorists have already been pursuing. Launched in 2010, the project has grown rapidly and made significant progress in its efforts to foster and encourage the development of an interconnected and interoperable, but also distributed and low-cost, system of open access projects and resources.

The Open Folklore project is more than its associated portal site. The project is pursuing educational projects aimed at educating scholars about open access issues. Importantly, it is also working with rights holders and publishing partners to encourage the pursuit of sustainable open access projects that comply with the basic technical standards already extant in the broader scholarly communications community.

Such background work is only visible to those who are following the project closely (ex: Fister 2010a, 2010b, 2011, 2012). For many students, scholars, other users of open access scholarship in the field, the Drupal-based portal is synonymous with the project. It is a web resource that, among other functions, provides centralized searching of, and access to, many open access journals, books, and repository collections in and for the field. Many of the bodies of scholarly content discoverable through OF Search have been made available independently by a diversity of organizations and publishers around the world. As these entities become linked together into the Open Folklore community, they gain formal status of Partners or Friends of the project. The World Oral Literature Project, about which my fellow panelist Mark Turin spoke in Montreal, is one such Friend of Open Folklore.

On the open access journal front, the Open Folklore project has, so far, worked with copyright holders to liberate and make digitally available the historical runs for eight significant folklore studies and ethnology journals, with many additional titles in the cue. This liberated corpus now includes almost all of the AFS section journals, but it also includes non-AFS titles as well.

Via the Open Folklore Search tool, the content of twenty-one journal and monograph series are harvested for discovery and full open access use. Many of these journals are very active in their publishing programs and thus the corpus of harvestable content accessible via OF Search grows almost weekly. As new journals and series in the field are made available on platforms that are compliant with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, they are approached and asked to join the Open Folklore effort. Content from such friends of the project is set to be automatically and regularly harvested for inclusion in the search corpus.

Some open access journals in the field, including some key titles such as Oral Tradition, Cultural Analysis, and Asian Ethnology are not yet published using an OAI compliant platform such as Open Journal Systems, Fedora, DSpace, and Digital Commons. To help users locate and use such titles, the Open Folklore portal maintains a linked list of several dozen such open access titles in the field.

Using the Internet Archive’s Archive-It service, OF has, in another phase of the project, started creating fully functional preservation copies of several content-rich websites important to the field. Included in the corpus of archived websites are the sites of some key not-for-profit organizations that have been shuttered during the current economic downturn. Among the sites that have already been archived and preserved (also here) are those of the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress, the Western Folklife Center, and the Community Arts Network. Similarly, in our grey literature efforts, the working papers and publications of The Fund For Folk Culture were archived and preserved before that organization ceased operation.

On the book front, a key partner in OF is the Utah State University Press, which is making its rich backlist of folklore studies books—including some of the most important works in the field—freely available online. Metadata for these titles, which they are distributing via the Utah State University institutional repository, has been harvested for unified discovery via Open Folklore Search.

Also central to the project is the IU Libraries’ 57,000+ volume Folklore Collection, a trove of thousands of books and journal runs that have now been made searchable and available through the HathiTrust Digital Library.

Recently added to the Open Folklore portal is the AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus, a controlled vocabulary for work in ethnographic disciplines that was developed by the AFS in partnership with the Library of Congress, with support from the Mellon Foundation.

That is a sample of the content linked to the project and portal. It is exciting that the corpus of OA content is growing so rapidly and that so much has been accomplished without recourse to the usual developmental sequence of large planning grant followed by large implementation grant and then the search for sustainability plans. The key factor in this dynamic are the partnership relationships that I am emphasizing along with a decision to build the project as a linking mechanism connecting together a diversity of already existing projects, software tools, and content collections. In the language of the moment best articulated by our colleague David Graeber (2002:70), Open Folklore aspires to be “horizontal” rather than “vertical” in orientation and organization.

Many opportunities and threats motivate the work of Open Folklore and its collaborators. For most participants, developing positive responses to the serials crisis and other large-scale transformations of the inherited publishing and research library systems are a key motivation. For example, for the library community, rethinking what collections development will entail in an era when monographs and journals are fully digital motivate excitement for new efforts like Open Folklore (American Library Association 2011). The librarians’ hope is that they can work directly with scholarly societies to assemble resources for the combined use of students, scholars, and the public. What is hoped for are partnerships in which societies and groups of societies pair up with libraries and groups of libraries, with the libraries developing reasonable divisions of labor among themselves and taking on co-leadership roles in disciplines for which there is local campus strengths.

Some of my own personal motivations for our work derive from observing the continued consolidation of power and influence in the hands of a few large multinational commercial publishers (Jackson 2011a). Witnessing the functional enclosure of society journal programs in anthropology by the largest publishing firms, I have been eager to help quickly build up an alternative framework for neighboring folklore and ethnology. One expression of this for OF has been prioritizing work with the rights holders for legacy print journals aimed at moving these titles quickly into open access availability ahead of any efforts to digitize them into toll access, revenue-generating resources.

As scholars working in another monograph dependent field, folklorists have special concern for the erosion of the university press system, now under tremendous pressure on many fronts—not only as a consequence of the serials crisis and competition from commercial publishers, but also because of university disinvestment, technical challenges, and a host of other factors that have been under discussion for much of the last decade under the broad heading of the “crisis in scholarly publishing.” (Surveyed most recently in Fitzpatrick 2011.) While founded on the notion that there will be a plurality of approaches to making scholarly communication work in the open access era, the Open Folklore project is particularly appreciative of those presses that are experimenting with library-press partnerships. For folklore studies, Utah State University Press is a standout, but University of Michigan Press is another leader in this realm.

As both project and portal, Open Folklore takes much of its strength from the free/open source software movements. In Two Bits, Chris Kelty (2008) has tracked the ways that these communities provided inspiration and resources for the development of the open access and open educational resource efforts. These are important contexts for projects like Open Folklore, but OF is also built directly upon on software tools and interoperability protocols that make the emerging scholarly communications ecosystem work. The image that we most often resort to in explaining how Open Folklore works is that of a decentralized network of content “buckets,” which are linked not through the centralization of content but through the harvesting of associated metadata. In this work, the most crucial technology is the metadata harvesting protocols that I mentioned above. OJS, DSpace, Drupal and other software platforms for the publishing and archiving of scholarly materials are made interoperable through adherence to these protocols. For OF, this technical interoperability is structurally parallel to the horizontal and distributed ways that the project fosters social partnerships between dispersed professional organizations, including libraries, publishers, scholarly societies, and research institutes.

What would I like non-folklorists to take away from the still new story of the Open Folklore project? First, that librarians are eager to partner with scholarly societies, whom they see as likely allies, because such societies are comprised of the college and university faculty and students whom they are charged to serve. I would add that this inherent alignment of interests is put under stress when societies function like, or partner with, those commercial publishers whose IT, IP, and business practices are most antagonistic to our home institutions, our libraries, and the debt-burdened students who pay our bills. In the emergent digital research library, librarians are eager to pursue projects with us that can redefine what it means to build a research collection in the public interest. Put simply, the wider library community has rallied around Open Folklore because it actualized their hope that societies can be partners rather than antagonists in the work ahead.

Another notion that I hope observers of the Open Folklore project will seize upon is the recognition that preservation-quality, technologically and intellectually robust scholarly communications projects do not need to be built under a single literal, organizational, or technical roof. They also can be gotten going with reasonable expectations of sustainability and scalability without recourse to ever-more-difficult-to-secure large-scale grants and foundation support. (See Kelty et al. 2007:574-576).

In her new book, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, Modern Language Association Director of Scholarly Communication Kathleen Fitzpatrick anticipates the kind of partnership that the American Folklore Society and the Indiana University Libraries are now pursuing. Discussing the point where university presses, libraries, and scholarly societies intersect, she observes:

Some of the weight of bringing together the work being done at the many institutions across the country and around the world will fall on scholarly societies, who might, under such a system, invest less in their own independent publishing ventures than in aggregating and indexing the texts published by university publishing centers across the web, making those texts available to their memberships through virtual collections. [Fitzpatrick 2011:Kindle Locations 3667-3669]

Like many other open access projects, Open Folklore hopefully suggests how the neoliberal transformation of scholarly publishing can be meaningfully resisted and an alternative system of scholarly communication system built in its place.

As I have recently tried to suggest in the context of the AAA’s ongoing conversation on publishing, we do not need to solve the biggest problems first. The American Folklore Society has not solved the financial questions that must be addressed before the essential revenue-producing Journal of American Folklore could become a gold open access title. Achieving more modest goals and making those journals that are not central to the revenue picture openly available provides experiences that will shape the eventual solving of the more intractable challenges. I advocate similar strategies for other fields, including of my other disciplinary home of anthropology. (The Linguistic Society of America has also made great strides down this path through its eLanguage program.) Just as librarians played such a key role in envisioning the initial AnthroSource plan, experience tells me that they would still like to partner with anthropologists to achieve our shared scholarly communications goals (AAA 2003; Goodman 2006;  Nardi et. al 2004 and especially Calpestri and Nardi 2004). With the example of the Occupy Wall Street movement before us and all signs pointing to an eminent student-debt driven reordering of North American higher education system, the time seems more than right for strengthening our partnerships with those working in the broad public interest and for asking hard questions about our corporate entanglements. It’s just one example among many, but I hope that Open Folklore’s work suggests that alternatives are available to all of us.

References Cited

American Anthropological Association (AAA)

2003 AAA Receives Funding to Launch Bold Electronic Initiative in Early 2004. http://web.archive.org/web/20080719122914/http://www.aaanet.org/press/ma_AnthroSource.htm, accessed February 3, 2012.

American Library Association

2011 Open Folklore Wins ALCTS Outstanding Collaboration Award. American Libraries. Febrary 22, 2011. http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/news/ala/open-folklore-project-receives-alcts-outstanding-collaboration-award, accessed November 9, 2011.

Brown, Michael F.

2011 The Future of AAA Publishing: Opening a Conversation. American Anthropological Association [Weblog]. http://blog.aaanet.org/2011/10/18/the-future-of-aaa-publishing-opening-a-conversation/, accessed February 3, 2012.

Calpestri, Suzanne, and Bonnie A Nardi

2004 Creating a Shared Vision for AnthroSource. Anthropology News 45(3): 9-9. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/an.2004.45.3.9/abstract, accessed February 3, 2012.

2011 The Present and Future of AAA Publishing. Anthropology News. http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2011/10/03/the-present-and-future-of-aaa-publishing/, accessed February 3, 2012.

Its this last dynamic that I would like to briefly address. Put simply, we do not have to solve the most difficult problems first. Instead, we can search out and harvest the low hanging fruit. Low hanging fruit is easy and inexpensive to gather. Gathering it, we learn and gain experiences (and buy time) that will allow us, eventually, to tackle bigger challenges on the basis of experience gained and lessons learned. When we spend little or no time/money pursuing the smaller, easier prospects, we put less at risk and we can afford to learn from our mistakes. A single fall out of the top of a tree can be catastrophic. Standing on the ground, we can usually stumble and fall countless times without doing ourselves any great harm.

It is in the spirit of making progress in the harvesting of low hanging fruit–wherein significant good can be done in an easy and inexpensive way–that I recently suggested a way in which the conference programs and abstracts of the American Anthropological Association could be made freely available online to all interested users as part of the HathiTrust Digital Library. My recent suggestion of this strategy was offered as small part of an important discussion of the future of the AAA publishing program that was begun on the AAA weblog. It can be found there attached to the first of two posts by Michael F. Brown. The first (on which I commented) can be found here and a second post, dealing with the expense picture for the total AAA publishing program, is here.

Starting with the easier and less risky tasks is also the strategy underpinning the American Folklore Society/Indiana University Bloomington Libraries’ joint project called Open Folklore. Now entering its second year, most of the progress that the project has made so far could be understood as gathering low hanging fruit. What is exciting is that if enough such modest efforts are pursued concurrently, they add up to results that are definitely not a small matter.

Readers interested in looking at the basket into which a large amount of low hanging fruit has been gathered, can consult the project reports of the Open Folklore project. Over the course of three narrative accounts–the first offered at launch, the second offered at the six month mark, and the most recent at the twelve month point–a large diversity of open access accomplishments are described. In and of themselves, each represents a relatively modest resource and a readily accomplished task. Taken together, they represent significant progress towards the goal of making folklore studies a more accessible discipline. No make-or-break revenue streams were harmed in the making of the Open Folklore portal and the work that has been accomplished is as robustly and professionally preserved as is possible in the year 2011.

Like all scholarly societies confronting these questions, the AFS faces giant uncertainties in the years and decades ahead. There are many questions that will eventually need to be faced. For instance, will it ever be possible to make The Journal of American Folklore accessible in a gold OA fashion? Probably, but the pathway to getting there is hardly clear and, for the present, solving the riddles of revenue, expense and organizational sustainability in that context is too big a task. My argument is that there are other ways to make steady progress that do not require us to take on excessive risk or to immediately untie the tightest, most complicated knots.

I encourage interested anthropologists to join the conversation that Michael F. Brown is hosting at the AAA weblog. Folklorists with thoughts on the future of scholarly communications in our field are invited to comment here or to write to me privately.

This post reflects my own thinking on the questions that it addresses and should not be read as an official statement by any of the organizations or projects with which I am associated.

First the set up. I am working extensively right now preparing a new course for spring 2011. This course was devised as part of my participation in a two year think-tank funded by the Teagle Foundation (a funder supporting projects designed to foster innovation in undergraduate teaching and learning) and organized by the American Folklore Society. The AFS project was built around the theme “What is the relationship between lay and expert knowledge in a complex society?” Colleagues teaching in a range of institutions, from community colleges and private liberal arts colleges to large research institutions gathered to explore the frontiers of research-based teaching, changing curriculum practices, and the wider contexts of our work in a small border discipline bridging the humanities and the social sciences, as well as the academy and the public sphere. As part of our work, we developed plans for new courses and teaching resources. Part of my work focused on working out plans for the course that I will initially teach next spring (it opens for enrollment today).

I have mentioned the course here previously. In a nutshell it uses the toolkit of folkloristics (and by extension my other field–cultural anthropology) to consider human responses–including aesthetic, expressive, customary, and communal responses–to a range of recently emergent and highly contested human social problems. Called “The New Social Problems: Communal and Expressive Responses” the new problem domains to be considered include such things as the digital divide, genetic engineering, intellectual property contests, and nanotechnologies. I am sure that I will be discussing the course further as it moves forward. The important point in this context is noting the influence that one colleague–whom I do not know and whom I have not yet met–has had on the shaping of my plans for this experimental course.

Michael Wesch, on his website/weblog Digital Ethnography (which is a key node in the digital infrastructure of his undergraduate-based research group), has regularly and effectively documented the pedagogical experiments and research work that he has been pursuing (over many years) with many successive groups of Kansas State University students. Wesch has been appropriately recognized and celebrated for the innovative work that he and his students have been doing. What I want to highlight here is that the manner in which he has documented and explained this work has made it richly available for the wider scholarly community. Because he has used http://mediatedcultures.net as a venue for reporting on his work, his strategies and experiences are openly and immediately accessible to me (and to my students) as well as to everyone else able to surmount the digital divide. Essays like “Our Class on How We Run Our Class” in which Wesch and his students describe (and enact) the technical and intellectual strategies through which a standard U.S. undergraduate course is turned into a deeply meaningful research collaboratory for social scientific investigation are just not available in the conventional published literature in our field. It is on the basis of the inspiration provided and the information conveyed by Wesch and his students that I am able to imagine a very different kind of course to pursue with my own students in January.

Michael Wesch’s Digital Ethnography efforts represent the kinds of “blogging” work that deserves to count as a substantive scholarly contribution (bridging teaching, research, and service) in such areas as annual review and tenure and promotion considerations.

Most importantly, these documents are a valuable resource to scholars. They are key historical documents, but they are also invaluable to those who need to know who studied what when?

Beyond their documentary value, the folklorists and ethnologists involved in the AFS should be proud of this accomplishment. Through collaborative partnerships and the deployment of some elbow grease, another worthy open access milestone has been met. Such efforts require labor and in-kind support, but they do not require a major grant, custom digital infrastructures, and outsourced service providers.

As readers of the news release will discover, highlights over the past six months include making programs and reports related to the annual meetings of the American Folklore Society (going back to 1889) freely accessible, the launch of the AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus, and the continued growth in the number of AFS section journals being made freely accessible in digital form. The big picture is that the community is continuing to come together to advance the goal of making folklore scholarship and resources more discoverable and accessible to community members, students, tradition bearers, and scholars worldwide. As was recognized this summer when OF was recognized with the Outstanding Collaboration Award by the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) during the American Library Association meetings, folklorists have a lot to be proud of. We are pioneering in many parts of the scholarly communications world, from the development of open access journals, books, repositories and archives to developing generalizable collaboration strategies for organizational partnership, especially between libraries, non-commercial publishers, and scholarly societies.

I encourage everyone to get caught up with what OF has been up to over the past six months and to continue to spread the word about the project while putting the tools and resources available at http://openfolklore.org to use in your work.

February 17-18, 2012

Keynote address by
Dr. Michael Ann Williams
(Western Kentucky University)

We are happy to announce the 5th annual collaborative conference between The Ohio State University Folklore Student Association and the Folklore & Ethnomusicology Student Associations at Indiana University. This conference aims to create a space for graduate and undergraduate students to share their research in folklore, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, material culture, performance studies, and related disciplines connected to the study of academic and vernacular interpretation(s) of everyday life.

In “A Theory of Play and Fantasy” (1955), Gregory Bateson makes reference to an Andaman Island peace-making ceremony in which participants strike one another to enact, then dispel their anger. Investigating the fine line between play and aggression, Bateson writes, “(t)he discrimination between map and territory is always liable to break down, and the ritual blows of peace-making are always liable to be mistaken for the ‘real’ blows of combat.” Bateson’s example leads us to think about the “maps” that organize our interpretations of cultural “territories”: systems of meaning, practices of communication, and theoretical and ideological frames. Inspired by Bateson’s seminal text, this year’s conference seeks to explore the following questions and themes:

• What devices do folklorists and ethnomusicologists use to (re)frame and (un)map? How are these concepts used to decontextualize, entextualize, and recontextualize?
• How do ideological frames and maps translate to concrete realities, and vice versa?
• What effect do frames and maps have on folk groups, music and culture?
• What are the politics of mapping? How do previously unmappable things become mappable? How do things fall off the map? How do frames and maps work as boundaries that define what lies within and without, sameness and difference?
• How have concepts of performance, play, ritual and literal frames affected theory and practice in folklore and ethnomusicology?
• How have frames and maps guided thinking about space, place, land(scape), region and nation-state, and how have the latter complicated our understanding of the former?
• In what other ways does current research engage with (re)framing and (un)mapping?

*We also welcome submissions on other topics.

The conference will have four opportunities for participation: 20-minute paper presentations, a poster session, 10-minute experimental panels for works-in-progress, and a discussion forum for all attendees. We will be accepting 250-word abstracts for all presentation formats, apart from the forum.

Abstracts must be submitted by November 18, 2011. Please email submissions to osu.iu.2012conference@gmail.com.

Register for this event for free at
http://osuiu2012conference.eventbrite.com/. For more information on the details of the conference visit http://cfs.osu.edu/fsa/studentconference in the coming months.

Center for Folklore Studies
Ohio State University
308 Dulles Hall
230 W. 17th Avenue
Columbus, OH 43210-1340
Phone: 614-688-3639
Fax: 614-292-1599
Email: osu.iu.2012conference@gmail.com
Visit the website at http://cfs.osu.edu/fsa/studentconference

This was the first time that an issue was published with an initial bundle of content and then added to as the year progressed. This represents a kind of transitional strategy bridging older journal publishing norms, in which an issue is prepared and then released into the world as a fully prepared bundle, and the newer pattern in which content is prepared and released into the world as soon as it is ready, item by item. The older pattern has certain hallmarks that many are still fond of, including sequentially paginated pages (in paper-like PDF format) and a table of contents in which articles appear at the top and reviews appear at the bottom. For authors, this format makes for objects that look familiar (to custom-minded observers) on such things as C.V. and annual reports. The cost, of course, is delay in publication, as works pile up in preparation for being bundled up as issues.

The newer approaches leverages the advantages of digital publication platforms and get information in circulation as quickly as possible, something that helps the research community in many ways.

MAR is moving from the older to the newer framework and will probably use the approach adopted for volume 5 again at least for volume 6 next year. This means that volume 6(1) will appear as soon as possible and will initially contain a group of materials from the “top” of the table of contents. Additional reviews will be added to the issue’s table of contents up until the point that additional articles or other content from the top of the table of contents are ready. At that point the effort will switch over to issue 6(2).

Publishing a combined “1-2″ issue for 2011 was a valuable step for me personally–beyond these considerations. It allowed me a bit more time this summer to work on other projects, something that I have sorely needed to do. While I had the help of a wonderful graduate student/editorial assistant through the middle of 2010, last academic year (2010-2011) was the first in which I handled the day to day editorial tasks on my own. This was fun and informative, of course, but there is only so much time in the day and it was nice to be able to focus this past summer on other obligations. The combined issue helped make that possible.

From a substantive point of view, 5(1-2) is full of interesting stuff and I am very thankful to the many authors, peer-reviewers, librarians, editorial board members, publishers, and other friends of MAR who have made it possible.

At 154 pages volume 5 is only #4 of 5 in terms of page length, but with 42 discrete contributions it covers a lot of interesting territory, from Captain Cook to the alternative globalization movement; from the history of shoes to the material realities of the current economic crisis. As has been true throughout the MAR experiment, contributions cover a wide diversity of world regions and theoretical, topical, and disciplinary concerns. I am especially proud of the ways that the journal continues to showcase work by the most distinguished senior scholars–generous colleagues such as Richard Bauman, Keith Hart, Marsha MacDowell, Edward T. Linenthal, and Aldona Jonaitis–alongside leading younger scholars, including folks like Karin Zitzewitz, Beth A. Buggenhagen, Elizabeth Hutchinson and so many others. I am also happy that the journal brings together, in what I think is a healthy way, the twinned and entwined concerns that are its focus—museum studies and material culture studies. Rooted in anthropology and folklore studies, MAR has been an effective meeting ground for scholars working in a great many fields. Alongside its folklorists and anthropologists, 5(1-2) features scholars representing the fields of comparative literature, history, art history, fashion studies, architecture, design, communications studies, and religious studies. This diversity is a great strength.

Also speaking to the journal’s diversity aspirations, 5(1-2) was the second issue to feature content in a language other than English. MAR 4(1) had included both French and English versions of Christian Bromberger’s commentrary on the Musée du Quai Branly and now, with 5(1-2) MAR has published a book review concurrently in Portuguese and English. Thanks go to author Lori Hall-Araujo and translator Roberta Crelier for the work on Lori’s review of Mestre Vitalino e artistas pernambucanos.

In conclusion, I wish to especially thank the authors of the issue’s peer-reviewed articles. Richard Bauman’s “Better than any monument”: Envisioning Museums of the Spoken Word is a great contribution to the history of the field, exploring the intersections of linguistic anthropology and museum anthropology. The paper continues his vital research work on the social history of early recording technologies and their intellectual and cultural ramifications. Thanks go to Carrie Hertz’ for her Costuming Potential: Accommodating Unworn Clothes. The article is a rich contribution to contemporary material culture studies, particularly relating to questions of consumption, circulation, reuse, and disposal.

The submission mailbox is always open. Please consider Museum Anthropology Review as a robust not-for-profit, gold open access publishing option for your work in museum and material culture studies.