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Posts from the ‘For the Record’ Category

Sep 7

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Museum Anthropology 32(2) and IU Folklore and Ethnomusicology

This past summer, my editorship of Museum Anthropology slowly wound to a stop. I saw tonight that the final issue of my term has now been posted online (behind a toll wall) in Wiley InterScience. It should thus appear in AnthroSource very soon and then it will show up in mailboxes. One of the consistent pleasures of the editorship has been publishing the work of smart and talented colleagues with whom I work here at Indiana University. The final issue 32(2) contains reviews or review essays by several of these friends.

Arle Lommel provided a review essay titled “From Galleries and Catalogues to Websites: Three Online Musical Instrument Exhibitions” (pp. 111-113).

Gabrielle A. Berliner authored two reviews for the issue.  One of the digital exhibition “Keeping the Faith: Judaica from the Aron Museum” (pp. 117-118) and one is of the book Jews and Shoes edited by Edna Nahshon (pp. 152-154).

Teri Klassen reviewed the book Texas Quilts and Quilters: A Lone Star Legacy by Marcia Kaylakie with Janice Whittington (pp. 134-135), while a second quilt book–Contemporary Quilt Art: An Introduction and Guide by Kate Lenkowsky (pp. 160-161) was reviewed by Janice E. Frisch.

Michael Dylan Foster’s contribution to the issue is a review of How to Wrap Five Eggs: Traditional Japanese Packaging by Hideyuki Oka and Michikazu Sakai (pp. 154-155).

An alumnus of our department, Katherine Roberts (now on the faculty of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) reviewed the book Sacred and Profane: Voice and Vision in Southern Self-Taught Art edited by Carol Crown and Charles Russell (pp. 122-124).

Finally, a DVD produced by our colleague Jon Kay (who is the director of Traditional Arts Indiana) was reviewed by Chris Goertzen of the University of Southern Mississippi. The film is Crafting Sound: Indiana Instrument Builders and it appear on page 119-120 in the new issue.

Thanks to everyone in (and of) the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology who worked so hard to help Museum Anthropology thrive over the past several years.

Aug 7

Friends at the IU Libraries

I think that today’s ARL webcast went pretty well.  I am frankly unsure because I am not 100% certain of what I said.  Nobody has yet pointed out any gaffes that I (might have) made. It was amazing that we as a group were able to hit the one hour mark exactly.  The ARL staff did a great job organizing the event.  Thanks to all the people who attended/listened in. The presentation will get posted to the web as a video sometime soon and I’ll get to feel self-conscious about it, but for now I am happy about how things seemed to have gone.  The other participants did a wonderful job and I learned not only from them but from the process in general.  While I may not have hit the nail on the head, the technology itself is pretty awesome and I can imagine all sorts of uses for it or similar systems.  Thanks to Jennifer Laherty for being a great partner in the project and to all of my many friends at the IUB libraries for supporting the many projects that we spoke of briefly.  You’re all awesome.

Speaking of the Libraries, I was saddened to learn recently that Library Dean Patricia Steele would be leaving IU for the Deanship at the University of Maryland.  Pat was been an amazing supporter of progressive reform in scholarly communications and has been a real leader in cultivating new roles for the library in this domain.  She has led or supported many general initiatives of great importance to me and she has been a great patron for Museum Anthropology Review.  Maryland is very lucky.

In the great news department, Carolyn Walters was named Interim Dean today.  Carolyn shares Pat’s commitments and enthusiasms for scholarly communications issues and I look forward to supporting her own efforts in the months ahead.

Three cheers for libraries and librarians (especially those at IU).

Apr 30

Teri Klassen Reviews “A Cherokee Woman’s America”

Congratulations to Teri Klassen on the publication of her review of the book A Cherokee Woman’s America: Memoirs of Narcissa Owen, 1831-1907. Her review appears in the latest issue of the (print only, but not-for-profit) journal Material Culture*. Well done.

*Volume 41, No. 1, Pp. 92-96.

Nov 22

Cultural Analysis and the Savage Minds OA Awards

The winners of the Savage Minds OA Anthropology Awards have just been announced in the run up to tomorrow night’s award’s ceremony in the SF Hilton Lobby at 6 pm. Cultural Analysis, a fine OA folklore journal on whose editorial board I serve has taken the runner up spot in an excellent field. The journal Anthropology Matters has won the first place spot. Learn about all the nominees on Savage Minds here and who the winners in all three categories are here. Congratulations to the winners and thanks to those who voted.

Nov 12

Catching up with FolkPub

The student editors and publishers in the Folklore and Ethnomusicology Publications Group (a.k.a. FolkPub) have been very busy in recent months. An enterprise of the graduate students in IU’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, FolkPub is the publisher of the venerable journal Folklore Forum and of books under the Trickster Press imprint. Much of their work has been migrating online in recent days and I wanted to note some highlights.

Current articles and reviews–in open full-text– in Folklore Forum are appearing at a new website: http://folkloreforum.net/ . The new site offers an RSS feed, so you can easily keep up with new content in a feed reader. Earlier this year, the new site and format debuted with an issue on folklore studies in East Asia in honor of Roger L. Janelli. In recent days, several new reviews have been added to the site and new contributions are expected on a continuing basis. Several special issues are in the works.

The entire back run of Folklore Forum back to its beginnings in 1968 have been made freely and fully available in the IUScholarWorks Repository service here at Indiana University. Find the whole collection, in searchable form here.

Work on the book side continues as well. At the recent American Folklore Society meetings, the FolkPub crew were an active presence, selling backlist titles and unveilling both a new title and a new business model. They were proud to release a a new, enhanced edition of Sandra Dolby’s classic work Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative. This title returns to print re-typeset with a new preface by the author and a foreward by Richard Bauman. Unlike past Trickster Press titles, this work has been published using a Print-on-Demand approach which means that it can be offerred at modest cost, that it should be available forever and that the students will not need to worry about managing complex shipping and storage problems. Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative is available directly from Amazon.com here. Also available in this new format is Trickster Press’ best-selling textbook The Emergence of Folklore in Everyday Life: A Fieldguide and Sourcebook, edited by George H. Schoemaker. It too is now available via Amazon.com. Find it here.

Information on the entire Trickster Press backlist can be found on the Press’ website at: https://www.indiana.edu/~folkpub/trickster/

One Trickster Press book title has already joined Folklore Forum as an open access resource in IUScholarWorks Repository. The book The Old Traditional Way of Life: Essays in Honor of Warren E. Roberts edited by Robert E. Walls and George H. Schoemaker and published in 1989 can not be found in its entirity here. (Find its open worldcat record here.)

Congratulations to the current FolkPub staff on all this good work. Well-wishes go as well to FolkPub staff who served in recent years. Their efforts provided a significant foundation for present accomplishments.

May 19

Translation / Transformation Conference

Congratulations to the student organizers who hosted the Translation/Transformation conference last Friday and Saturday (May 16-17) at The Ohio State University. This was a conference organized by the Folklore Student Association at OSU and the Folklore and Ethnomusicology students from Indiana University. It was a wonderful, lively, productive graduate student conference in which faculty from the two programs were asked to serve as panel discussants. The student papers, from those delivered by undergraduates to those offered by seasoned dissertation writers, were uniformly excellent and the OSU students, as local hosts, really rolled out the red carpet for everyone participating. It was a wonderful event, with plenty of time for fruitful discussion and social networking. The faculty participants, including myself, seemed uniformly pleased with, and impressed by, the overall effort. The student organizers clearly worked very hard to make the event a success. Until the link goes away, the conference program can be found online here.

Feb 21

Museum Anthropology Review @ IUScholarWorks Journals

I am very pleased to announce the official launch of Museum Anthropology Review as a part of IUScholarWorks Journals. In its new home with its new publisher–the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries–MAR will be using Open Journal Systems software, the leading software tool for the complete publication of open access scholarly journals.  Read all about it on the MAR WordPress site and find the press release at IU Media Relations here. See the journal itself here. Please consider registering with the journal. Its free, it brings benefits to you, and it helps us demonstrate that the journal has a large and growing user base.

Jan 19

Museum Anthropology @ Wiley-Blackwell

FYI:  Museum Anthropology has a new official webpage on the site of its publisher, Wiley-Blackwell.  Find it here.

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