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Posts from the ‘Good News’ Category

Sep 3

Utah State University Press = Win

Take a break from grouchy discussions of scholarly communication, scholarly societies, and the destruction of the university press system and feast your eyes on a big pile of good news.  Utah State University Press is not only not going away (as it might have, as reported in IHE here) but it is moving on to great things as part of the USU Library. Its even better than I had hoped.  There will be more great news in the future, I think, but for now check this out.  Like old fashioned books?  They will sell them to you. Like e-books?  They will sell them to you? Like free PDFs of books? They will just give you some! How great is that?

For my folklore colleagues especially, check it out.  Among the OA offerings are:

Books from across USUP’s lists are available OA in the DigitalCommons@USU system. History and literature of the North American West, Mormon history, and works on teaching writing are other areas of strength in addition to folklore studies.

Three cheers for Utah State University Press. When other small university presses are dead or headed in the wrong direction, here is one that is finding a path to new accomplishment.  Thank you Utah State University administrators!

Aug 24

Folklore Studies Assistant Professorship Open at George Mason University

The following important notice is being circulated on behalf of the folklore faculty at George Mason University:

The Department of English in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at George Mason University announce a tenure-track assistant professor position in Folklore beginning Fall 2011. Read more

Aug 13

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What can the Open Folklore project help me do now? [2]

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.

Aug 1

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What can the Open Folklore project help me do now? [1]

While one way to think about Open Folklore is as a website or as a scholarly portal (that will live at http://www.openfolklore.org/ ) another way to think about it is to see it as a branding effort or as a unified (unifying) label for a mixed collection of projects, efforts and services being pursued by the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries and the American Folklore Society aimed at making more of the scholarly literature and a greater range of scholarly resources in folklore studies openly available for those who need them. This post is the first in what I hope will be a series in which I show as quickly as I can what some of these resources are and how to access them independently. I am drawing here upon what we might call the “quiet phase” projects that provide the current core of content around which the Open Folklore portal or (viewed somewhat differently) the Open Folklore banner can be wrapped.

In this, context, “What can the Open Folklore project help me do now?” Here is a first and (I hope) simple answer.

Answer 1:  Open Folklore can enable you to consult the full text of out-of-copyright books from the Indiana University Libraries’ famed Folklore Collection in the Hathi Trust Digital Library.

The IU Folklore Collection was digitized by the Google Books project in partnership with the libraries of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC). It constitutes the first “Collection of Distinction” to be digitized in this partnership.

Much of the content (books and journals) from the Folklore Collection has already appeared in Hathi Trust. For works that are no longer under copyright, the full text of the original work is both full text searchable and full text readable. So, if you want to consult and read or search a particular book in the collection, you can now do so online. If you wish to try it out, here are the stable URLs for some sample works in the collection.

George Bird Grinnel’s The Punishment of Stingy and Other Indian Stories (1901)
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/inu.39000005892356

George H. McKnight’s St. Nicholas: His Legend and His Role in the Christmas Celebration and Other Popular Customs (1917)
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/inu.39000005678284

Arthur Mitchell’s On the Popular Weather Prognostics of Scotland (1863)
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/inu.32000001681875

Max Müller’s Lectures on the Science of Religion: With a paper on Buddhist Nihilism and a Translation of the Dhammapada or “Path of Virtue” (1872)
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/inu.30000050315583

Paul Radin’s El Folklore de Oaxaca (1917)
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/inu.30000118485246

The stable URL for these works also enables you to reliably cite these work when writing or creating new scholarly projects building on this older work. They can be used in citations in new written (and perhaps printed) works such as books and articles, but also in websites, blog posts, and other scholarly new media.

There are (as of today) 2425 other works from the Folklore Collection itself available in full text via Hathi Trust. Hathi Trust as a whole provides full text access to over a million volumes that are in the public domain (representing about 19% of the collection as a whole.) [More on using the in-copyright volumes later.]

Find a volume of relevance to you and try out the folklore studies offerings of Hathi Trust, made possible by our friends at the Indiana University Bloomington libraries, the librarians of the CIC, Google Books, and the other Hathi Trust partners.

Jul 28

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Open Folklore

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 25

Worldwide List of OA Journals in Anthropology

Thanks to antropologi.info for compiling a worldwide list of (gold) open access journals in anthropology and neighboring fields. (Many folklore and ethnology titles are included.) In addition to listing known journals with links, a search utility has been set up on the site. Find the OA anthropology journal list here: http://www.antropologi.info/links/Main/Journals . This is a great resource for a number of reasons, including the presence here of titles such that have not been included in the Directory of Open Access Journals. The listing should be of special value to higher education librarians and the students and faculty that they support.

Antropologi.info had already established itself as the best blogroll in anthropology (see here), so this was a logical and wonderful next step.

Jul 15

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Congratulations Dr. Jessica W. Blanchard

Another successful dissertation defense to report and celebrate. Jessica Walker Blanchard (a.k.a. Dr. Blanchard) is a wonderful person and scholar whom I have known and respected for many years. She has just completed her Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Oklahoma (where I was proud to be one of her teachers). I am little behind in reading her dissertation (about a chapter short of finished) but I can say that it is a important contribution to anthropology and Native American studies.  Jessica’s focus in her study are the activities of Southern Baptist missionaries (church “planters”) of diverse Native American backgrounds who establish mission congregations in (i.e. “targeting”) particular and specific local Native American communities. Her work was undertaken in congregations in Central Oklahoma, near the communities of Little Axe, Shawnee, and Earlboro. When she is not dissertating, Dr. Blanchard is a researcher at the Center for Applied Social Research at OU. She has been involved in a wide range of complex and important research projects, mainly focusing on the sociocultural aspects of health and wellness in Oklahoma and in general. Congratulations Jessica!

Jul 14

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Opening Three More Established Folklore Studies Journals

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/000496431

Keystone 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/006931628

Jewish 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.

Jul 14

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Congratulations to Dr. Kate Hennessy

News arrived today of Kate Hennessy‘s successful dissertation defense. Kate is an awesome scholar that everyone should know about. She has just finished her doctorate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Her dissertation, which I can recommend on the basis of firsthand experience, is titled: Repatriation, Digital Technology, and Culture in a Northern Athapaskan Community. It is excellent. It is an an important contribution at the intersections of visual anthropology, museum anthropology, digital culture studies, media studies, indigenous studies, and applied anthropology. It is a companion to the award winning media project Dene Wajich–Dane-zaa Stories and Songs, which Kate produced with a impressive group of Dane-zaa and non-native collaborators. (Including our mutual friends Pat Moore and Amber Ridington.) More could be said, but for now three cheers for Kate!

Jul 11

Brian Gilley Named Director of IU’s First Nations Educational and Cultural Center

Congratulations to Dr. Gilley, IUB and the FNECC.

Brian Gilley, associate professor of anthropology and director of the ALANA U.S. Ethnic Studies program at the University of Vermont, has been selected as the first director of the First Nations Educational and Cultural Center at Indiana University Bloomington.

Read the full IUB Press Release here.

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