Oct 20
Many folklorists in the United States have just returned from the annual meetings of the American Folklore Society, which were held in Nashville, Tennessee. The meetings were intellectually rich and diverse and they were characterized by a sizable quantity of good news for the field. We learned about growing membership numbers, academic program enlargement, a new AFS website, numerous national projects and strengthened international collaborations. Quite inspiring! While it seemed like I was in business meetings during every waking hour, everyone else seemed to have a healthy mix of work and play. A good time seemed to be had by almost all. The few papers and presentations that I got to hear and see were uniformly excellent.
One of the things that I was involved with was the launch of the Open Folklore portal site: www.openfolklore.org
While we spoke of launching the site at the AFS board meeting on Wednesday morning, we actually flipped the switch (so to speak) on Tuesday afternoon. We did this just in case there were technical problems to resolve, but everything worked great and by the middle of the afternoon on Tuesday the site was live. Wednesday morning, Indiana University issued a press release announcing the launch. You can find it at http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/15922.html
Wednesday morning, Moria Smith and Julie Bobay (both fellow Open Folklore project team members from Indiana University Bloomington Libraries) gave an overview of the OF project and the OF portal site to the AFS Executive Board (of which I am a member). That went very well, I think. In the afternoon, the gave a similar overview to the leaders of academic and public sector folklore programs. While few had a chance, by this point, to actually use the site, there was uniform enthusiasm for its purpose and promise. The project was mentioned by AFS President Kurt Dewhurst during the conference’s opening ceremonies Wednesday night. On Thursday at noon, the OF team had a very fruitful meeting with representatives of Utah State University Libraries (including the Utah State University Press and USU Special Collections) and the Utah State folklore program. Utah State is the Open Folklore project’s first strategic partner. On Thursday afternoon I presented a brief overview of OF in a panel of which I was a part and Moria Smith and I demonstrated the site to interested visitors to an Open Folklore table near the book room. Thanks go to all of these interlocutors and audiences.
Open Folklore’s Facebook presence continued to get the “like” treatment from supporters and we reached and surpassed our goal of 250 Facebook supporters during the meeting. Folklorists aren’t very big on Twitter yet, but the ranks of Open Folklore’s Twitter followers also grew during the meetings. It was a tough week to launch in a sense because it was a week prior to Open Access Week and the AFS meetings co-occurred with the Association of Research Libraries meeting and the Educause meeting. Both of these meetings are of special relevance to audiences sympathetic to the goals of the Open Folklore project.
The first review of the Open Folklore site came in during the meetings. On his weblog Archivology, Creighton Barrett offered a very careful study of the architecture and functionality of the Open Folklore portal, one that extended his earlier pre-launch discussions. The Open Folklore team is very appreciative of the careful attention that he has given the project. The portal site was also highlighted in an October 14 Library Journal essay by Barbara Fister. In addition, the portal site has also gotten a good bit of link love, for which we are also thankful.
Thanks go to everyone who has tried the site out, put it to actual use, or suggested either additional content for liberation or improvements to the portal itself. We look forward to following up on the suggestions that many made during our time in Nashville. Thanks to all who spoke up so enthusiastically about the project and its potential. The project team is certainly more enthusiastic than ever.
Happy Open Access week!
I am just back from a wonderful trip to Oklahoma for the 14th Annual Euchee Heritage Days Festival. It was really great. Lots of people, lots of hard working volunteers, lots of good food and interesting activities. I will try to write about it properly soon.
Tonight I just want to note that the new week is almost here and that we are now counting down to the launch of the Open Folklore portal site on Wednesday–the first day of the American Folklore Society meetings. Please keep an eye out for more news of the site and its debut. I hope that everyone who reads this post will feel encouraged to give Open Folklore the “like” treatment at the new OF Facebook page and/or to “follow” “openfolklore” on Twitter.
If you were to tweet about Open Folklore, the hashtag is #openfolklore. The AFS meetings hashtag will probably be #AFS2010.
If you are already liking or following OF, thank you for helping us spread the word.
Just a quick note to record my appreciation for everyone involved in organizing the Indiana University Statewide Information Technology Conference. This was my second year attending and my second year presenting at the conference and it is a really great event. Today I spoke on behalf of the Open Folklore project team, describing the goals of the project and where we stand in addressing them. Everyone was really nice and it was good to have an additional chance to articulate what the project is and where it is headed as the team prepares to unveil the associated portal site at the upcoming American Folklore Society meetings in Nashville in October. Thanks to all the Open Folklore project team members for your support and your good work.
This post is the third in a series [1] [2] discussing what the efforts bundled as the Open Folklore project can do for the community now, before the portal site that will live at http://www.openfolklore.org/ is finalized.
A part of the Open Folklore effort that has not been discussed here previously concerns the plan to durably archive content-rich websites of relevance to scholars and practitioners in the field of folklore studies. Recently a need arose to put these plans to a quick test. The Community Arts Network (CAN), a not-for-profit service organization that had built up a large and widely used website found itself needing to cease operation of its elaborate site. On August 31, Debora Kodish of the Philadelphia Folklore Project contacted the Open Folklore team at Indiana about the possibility that the project might be able to assist in the preservation of the CAN assets. Discussions and investigations quickly followed and the IU Libraries decided to pursue archiving the site. This work was complete before the time of the scheduled shut down on Labor Day. It all worked and now we can see what a website archived in the manner that we anticipate using looks and feels like. The words of appreciation that have been offered from the community arts and public folklore communities have been most appreciated and are a major source of encouragement for what we are trying to get going with Open Folklore.
To help explicate a bit further, this is a re-posting of an announcement being circulated by the Community Arts Network (CAN). It was crafted with input from the librarians at Indiana who are central to the current early-phase work on the Open Folklore project. Thanks go to everyone who has been involved in these efforts. (See the CAN Facebook page for additional discussion.)
The Community Arts Network (CAN), Indiana University Bloomington Libraries, and the American Folklore Society are pleased to announce that the CAN Web site has been archived as part of the Open Folklore project (http://www.openfolklore.org/). Open Folklore is intended to be an online portal to open-access digital folklore content and plans to launch a prototype in October at the American Folklore Society meeting in Nashville, Tenn.
After CAN announced it would be forced to immediately shut down its Web site due to lack of funds, the IU Bloomington Libraries offered to capture the CAN Web site using Archive-It, a subscription service from the Internet Archive that allows institutions to build and preserve collections of born-digital content. The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded in 1996 to build an “Internet library” with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to collections that exist in digital format. Because CAN is a content-rich Web site that is of great interest to folklorists, the IU Bloomington Libraries made use of their subscription to Archive-It to preserve the site without charge.
The archived CAN is static, but is fully text searchable, though some external links and some internal scripted functions may no longer work. It is, however, a unique and permanent record of the site as it existed at the time. Users may visit the archived site at http://wayback.archive-it.org/2077/20100906194747/http://www.communityarts.net/. The full text of the site may be searched at the Archive-It home site, http://www.archiveit.org/.
Art in the Public Interest, CAN’s non-profit, will continue to seek funding to develop the CAN materials into a sophisticated archive library.
Debora Kodish, founder of the Philadelphia Folklore Project first suggested that Open Folklore might have a role to play in preserving CAN, and this suggestion was enthusiastically and swiftly adopted. IU Bloomington Libraries Dean Brenda Johnson described this sequence of events as an excellent proof of concept for Open Folklore and for the value of collaboration between a research library and the scholarly community it serves. “This is a sterling example of why digital preservation efforts are so important. Without the active collaboration of the folklore community, and without IUB Libraries participation in Archive-It, a unique and valuable online resource would have vanished.”
I invite you to check out the archived CAN site.
Aug 13
This is a second in a series of postings describing things that can already be done with folklore studies scholarship that has been made available through the efforts of the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries. These various projects are being brought together in the Open Folklore project. While it will soon provide a portal to this diverse range of this content at http://www.openfolklore.org/, a great deal of content has already been made available. The first post described accessing folklore books via the Hathi Trust Digital Library. This post explains accessing several bundles of materials via the IUScholarWorks Repository.
IUScholarWorks Repository is a DSpace-based institutional repository for Indiana University Bloomington. Folklore studies materials that have been incorporated within it include the following items and groups of items. While I could describe how to access these materials, it will be easiest for new users to just click the links given and explore the repository.
The journal Folklore and Folk Music Archivist (1958-1968) can be accessed here:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/706
[As discussed here previously] a range of reports, monographs and working papers published by The Fund for Folk Culture can be accessed here:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/3850
The back files of the journal New Directions in Folklore (1997-2003) can be found here:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/6614
Newly added, and of special interest, are several special publications issued by the American Folklore Society, including the book 100 Years of American Folklore Studies: A Conceptual History edited by WIlliam M. Clements and published by the Society during its centennial year, 1988. These materials can be found here:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/9004
The motherlode of folklore scholarship in IUScholarWorks Repository are the back files of the journal Folklore Forum. Published since 1968, forty years of journal content (1968-2008), constituting 1314 items, is available here:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/1168
Folklore Forum is a publication of Trickster Press, the student-run publishing house in Indiana’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. Trickster continues to publish Folklore Forum as a gold open access journal (see here). In addition to making its back files available in IUScholarWorks Repository, the Trickster Press team, working with the IUB Libraries has also made available content from the Folklore Forum Bibliographic and Special Series (87 items), which can be found here:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/2567
Books from the Folklore Forum Monograph Series, can be found here:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/2569
In addition to these Folklore Forum-related materials, Trickster Press has also opened four of its out of print book titles. These are:
Log Buildings in Southern Indiana by Warren Roberts (1996) available here:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/3775
Folklore on Two Continents: Essays in Honor of Linda Degh edited by Carl Lindahl and Nikolai Burlakoff (1980) available here:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/3774
Fields of Folklore: Essays in Honor of Kenneth S. Goldstein edited by Roger D. Abrahams (1995) available here:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/3773
and The Old Traditional Way of Life: Essays in Honor of Warren E. Roberts edited by Robert E. Walls, George H. Schoemaker, Jennifer Livesay, and Laura Dassow Walls (1989) available here:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/3137
In classic institutional repository mode, various materials produced in IUB’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology are also available in IUScholarWorks Repository. These materials, which include conference proceedings, post prints, MA theses, sound recordings, and syllabi can be found here:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/28
This heterogeneous corpus of folklore scholarship is continuing to grow and it is anticipated that the Open Folklore portal will make consulting it easier in the years ahead. In the meantime, there is plenty for the early adopters to read, study and enjoy.
Thanks to all who have worked to make these resources openly available. Thanks as well to the many people who have expressed support for the Open Folklore project.
The author of the blog Archivology has offered “5 Suggestions for the Open Folklore Project.” This is a detailed and thoughtful contribution, one very worthy of the attention of those interested in scholarly communications issues in general and in folklore specifically. Together with Alex Golub’s discussion of the project on Savage Minds, these are valuable inputs for the early phase of the effort. Those involved in the early phase of the project are very appreciative of these commentators and also of those who have spread news of the project on twitter and in the media (see Nathan Miller’s story in the Indiana Daily Student here).
Jul 28
Open Folklore–The announcement. I will write of it more later but for now I just want to highlight the announcement last night by the American Folklore Society (AFS) and the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries of the formal start of the Open Folklore project. Read all about it here http://www.openfolklore.org/ Quite a lot of work has already been accomplished during the quiet phase. Thanks to everyone who has work to make this happen, especially the AFS and IUB Library leadership for supporting it. Thanks too to the rights holders who are freely sharing the content under their stewardship.
The earlier post on Opening Three More Established Folklore Studies Journals can be understood more clearly in light of this broader project.
Jul 14
More excellent news from the effort to make more of the scholarly literature in (and beyond) folklore studies freely available. This account comes from Simon Bronner (re-posted from his H-FOLK announcement), who led the effort to open up the three important titles discussed here. This effort was done in collaboration with the IUScholarWorks project in the context of broader efforts undertaken with the American Folklore Society. (More about these soon.)
The only point I would add to Simon’s account is that the content will not cease being available in Hathi Trust when it also becomes accessible via Google Books. This is reassuring and useful in a number of ways, including the fact that Hathi Trust is a major digital library managed in the public interest by a large and growing consortium of libraries and universities. Indiana University is a leading partner in it. Thus this content (and so much else from the digitization of the important IU Folklore Collection) is not solely being stewarded–and made useful and accessible online–by a corporation whose time horizons and motivations are understandably different from scholarly ones. That said, Google has been an invaluable partner by providing the digitization (or digital creation) of these resources and it will be very useful to be able to search and use such content in two contexts, each with different sets of digital tools and built for different purposes. Thanks go to Simon and the relevant scholarly organizations/communities for the years of effort that went into these titles and for the work of making them available to the world. Folklore studies is stronger for these efforts.
Penn State Harrisburg, which features a doctoral program in American Studies with a folk cultural area of study, in cooperation with Indiana University ScholarWorks and Google is happy to report the availability online of back issues for three important journals in folklore studies: Folklore Historian, Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review, and Keystone Folklore. The material is available at no cost in HathiTrust Digital Library at the moment until it migrates to Google Books (where it will still be available gratis). All the material is viewable as full-text with the exception of some issues of Keystone Folklore Quarterly, which are at present have limited search functionality.
The URLs are:
Keystone Folklore:
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000496431Keystone Folklore Quarterly:
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006090454(Keystone Folklore was the publication of the Pennsylvania Folklore Society and featured important early works in folklife and material culture, public folklore, and ethnic-urban folklore, many produced by students at the folklore and folklife program at the University of Pennsylvania).
Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review:
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006931628Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Newsletter:
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006929769(Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review was the publication of the Jewish Folklore and Ethnology section of the American Folklore Society, before the establishment of the Jewish Cultural Studies series published by Littman. It featured many special-themed issues, including Yiddish folklore, material culture, folk dance, foodways, pilgrimage, Israeli ethnography, folk literature, and Jews in the Heartland).
Folklore Historian:
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006811508(Folklore Historian is the still active publication of the History and Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society. Back issues feature essays on the history of folklore studies globally as well as studies incorporating or reflecting on historical methodologies; special issues include “Theorizing Folklore,” “Symposium on the Contributions of Francis James Child to Folklore Studies,” “Martha Beckwith: The First American Chair of Folklore Studies.”
Sincerely,
Simon Bronner
Other folklore, ethnology, and ethnomusicology titles that have been made available through the work of the IUScholarWorks project include: the Folklore Forum backfiles (see new content here), New Directions in Folklore, and the Folklore and Folk Music Archivist. In addition, IUScholarWorks Journals publishes (with its partners) the titles Museum Anthropology Review, Anthropology of East Europe Review, and the Inter-American Journal of Education for Democracy.
[As noted in today’s AFS email newsletter] After a period of discussion and review, the American Folklore Society‘s Executive Board [on which I serve] has issued a public statement on recent Arizona immigration legislation. The Society will distribute this statement to relevant public officials and bodies in Arizona, and to other learned societies.
The statement reads:
The American Folklore Society, the US-based professional association for the field of folklore studies, with a membership of 2,000 people and institutions, and an annual meeting that draws more than 700 participants from around the world, has historically supported policies that prohibit discrimination based on ethnicity, gender, national origin, race, religion, or sexual orientation, and our field has long been concerned with the well-being of immigrant populations.
The Executive Board of the American Folklore Society takes notice of Arizona Senate Bill 1070, requiring all local law enforcement officials to investigate a person’s immigration status when there is a reasonable suspicion that the person is in the United States unlawfully, regardless of whether that person is suspected of a crime. We also take notice of Arizona House Bill 2281, that prohibits public schools in the state from offering, at any grade level, courses that advocate ethnic solidarity or cater to specific ethnic groups.
More than a century of research in the field of folklore studies (and in other fields in the humanities and social sciences) has detailed the cultural, political, and social impact of discrimination based on ethnicity, national origin, and race. Based on that research, the Executive Board of the American Folklore Society considers these laws just identified, and the ways they may be implemented, to be discriminatory.
The Executive Board of the American Folklore Society resolves that the Society will not hold a scholarly conference in the State of Arizona until such time that Arizona Senate Bill 1070 and Arizona House Bill 2281 are either repealed or struck down as constitutionally invalid and thus unenforceable by a court.
Shreds and Patches 