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Posts from the ‘Good News’ Category

Apr 23

What’s New in Museum Anthropology Review?

I am very pleased to announce the publication of Museum Anthropology Review 4(1). This is the spring 2010 issue and there are a number of things to say about it.  First, a huge expression of  thanks go to everyone who worked to bring it into the world. Managing editor Janice Frisch in particular deserves special credit for working hard to bring several new features online.

First things first, the issue contains a lot of wonderful content. Measured in old-fashioned pages, the issue serves up 143 pages brought to the world by twenty-two generous and smart authors. Thanks to all.

The issue is also the first in which we have published a contribution in a language other than English. Christian Bromberger’s valuable essay “From Race To Culture To Esthetics: A Museographic Journey into French Ethnology” is published here in both French and English versions. My Indiana University colleagues Raymond J. DeMallie and Noemie Waldhubel assisted in the preparation of Professor Bromberger’s bilingual essay for publication. Where possible, we hope to publish additional content in languages other than English thereby contributing to the further internationalization of museum and material culture studies.

MAR 4(1) is the first for which we are offering contributions in both PDF and a new HTML format designed to match the new journal style that was developed last year. While several early issues of the journal featured content in a very rough and ready HTML format, we are now using a relatively sophisticated (CSS) style sheet and we hope that we have really improved reader’s experiences with the journal. If you encounter problems, please let us know.

As always, MAR is a fully open access journal that is available to all interested readers at no cost. This is possible because of the wonderful support provided by the very talented librarians behind Indiana University Bloomington’s IUScholarWorks project. They are heroes in the work of building a better and more ethical system of scholarly communication.

Please consider signing up as a “Reader” at the journal’s website. Its free and it helps us measure support for the journal. You’ll also get table of contents sent twice per year by email. Museum Anthropology Review is also on Facebook.

Mar 15

Cultural Property Research Group, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Very happily, I have begun a week-long visit to Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, Germany. I am very fortunate to be the guest of the Cultural Property Research Group. This is a major interdisciplinary project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). I very much recommend their research weblog (here) and the project website (here).

Today I spent time talking to some of the doctoral students in law and in cultural anthropology/European ethnology/folklore studies who are pursuing dissertation projects within the larger research group. They’re all wonderfully smart and very generous in their patience with an American who has never spoken a word of German in his life. In addition to beginning discussions of their interesting projects, they taught me a bit about the changing nature of academic life in Germany and showed me around their beautiful campus and city.

While I will hopefully have something from my own work to offer my hosts, I am enjoying learning about their studies and connecting them with the work of favorite (and very relevant) colleagues back home who are working on similar issues. I was reassured by the familiarity of the topics that we discussed today.  In the usual one-thing-leads-to-another fashion we jumped from geographic indicators to WIPO policy, open source software, cultural appropriation, human rights, heritage lists, and open access.

Thanks to everyone involved in my visit possible.

Dec 22

Delaware Tribe in a Cherokee Nation

With this note, I want to congratulate Brice Obermeyer on the publication of his new book Delaware Tribe in a Cherokee Nation (University of Nebraska Press, 2009). Brice is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Emporia State University. His book began as his dissertation research at the University of Oklahoma, where I had the privilege of serving on his doctoral committee. Of the Ph.D. students with whom I have worked, Brice has the distinction of being the first to accomplish the difficult additional task of seeing his doctoral dissertation transformed into a published book. This major effort entails not only additional research, writing and revision, but the practical matters of securing a publisher, further revision on the basis of peer-review, and going through the multitude of steps the follow in the production process. Congratulations to Brice on his negotiating these many steps successfully.

An important study of a complex and contentious topic, Brice’s book has been published by the University of Nebraska Press, an important publisher of books in anthropology and Indigenous studies. His study is a crucial examination of the political and historical complexities that have led to the entanglement of the Delaware people with the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma and of the Delaware struggle for self-determination in a context in which they are doubly encompassed by both the United States and the Cherokee Nation, two powerful governments whose interests have often been hostile to Delaware ones. To explore the complicated ways in which the exercise of Cherokee national sovereignty has resulted in the disenfranchisement and subjugation of another American Indian people is a difficult and painful undertaking, one that Brice pursues with care. Brice succeeds in accounting for the complexities of the Delaware situation, respecting the diversity of views found among Delaware people, and contextualizing the historical events and social and culture processes that make sense of the political paradoxes that Delaware and Cherokee people must negotiate. A excerpt is available on the University of Nebraska Press website.

Congratulations to Brice and to his Delaware collaborators.

Dec 7

Anthropology of East Europe Review Now Gold OA: Joins IUScholarWorks Journals

Congratulations to everyone involved in moving the journal Anthropology of East Europe Review to the IUScholarWorks Journals project. Find the new issue–27(2)–online here:
http://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/aeer/index

Dec 7

2 Comments

Fund for Folk Culture Publications Available Online Through Indiana-AFS Partnership

From an AFS news release on behalf of the Fund for Folk Culture:

The Indiana University Bloomington Libraries and the American Folklore Society, in partnership with The Fund for Folk Culture and the Indiana University Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, are pleased to announce the availability of a series of policy publications created by The Fund for Folk Culture.

The Fund, which was created in 1992 and suspended its programs in early 2009, supports the creation, conservation, innovation, and value of traditional culture and folk arts in community life through grantmaking, convenings, the creation of networks, and research and publications, all focused on issues critical to artists, tradition bearers, and the organizations supporting their work. Its goal is to “create a world in which diverse cultural heritages are honored and all people have the right and resources to exercise preservation of their cultural traditions and to create new traditions for the times.”

The body of Fund for Folk Culture publications now available includes a three-part Issues in Folk Arts and Traditional Culture Working Paper series; reports on three meetings devoted to the examination of issues facing refugee and immigrant communities, and individual folk artists, in the US; a report on the “Folklore’s Futures: Scholarship and Practice” symposium sponsored by the Fund and the American Folklore Society in 2006; and two monographs, Culture and Commerce: Traditional Arts in Economic Development and Envisioning Convergence: Cultural Conservation, Environmental Stewardship and Sustainable Livelihoods. Other Fund publications will be made available in the near future.

These published works are being made available in digital form as part of the IUScholarWorks Repository.  In this form, each published work has a durable URL (web address) that will remain stable, insuring that future citations to this work will lead back to the full source itself.  This published work is fully open access and documents are provided in PDF format.  The IUB Libraries are committing to the migration of these materials to future file formats so as to preserve the availability of these works.  The IUScholarWorks Repository uses standard metadata protocols, insuring that the works included in it are easily findable through such services as Google Scholar and OAIster, the Open Archives Initiative database, a union catalog containing records for millions of digital scholarly resources.

Now available and searchable in IUScholarWorks Repository, the publications of The Fund for Folk Culture join a growing corpus of fully accessible publications in folklore studies, including the full back files of The Folklore and Folk Music Archivist and Folklore Forum.  The IUB Libraries and the American Folklore Society are exploring the possibility of other partnerships to create greater accessibility for important classes of publication in our field that are presently without a long-term digital home.

Find the publications of The Fund for Folk Culture online here:  https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/3850

Dec 4

Museum Anthropology Review Gets a New Look

I am very pleased to report that Museum Anthropology Review, the journal of material culture and museum studies that I edit (with the help of many great colleagues), now boasts a new and improved look and feel. MAR is published using Open Journal Systems by the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries as part of the IUScholarWorks Project. My wonderful library colleagues have done great work on our behalf designing a crisp and appealing new journal style (ie. CSS). The new look is visible on the site now. With the next issue (MAR 4(1)), the new content will appear in a nice matching HTML format.  I hope that everyone finds these enhancements to be a significant improvement on the basic style with which we began.  Thanks to all of the IUScholarWorkers for this wonderful work and thanks to all of the authors, editors, peer-reviewers, media reviewers, and readers who are making MAR a big (free-to-the-world) success.

I am so pleased with this enhancement and I cannot say enough good things about everyone at the IUB Libraries. Their commitment to building up a sensible open access (OA) scholarly communications system is inspirational and contagious.

If you find any bugs in the new style, please let us know by email at museumanthropologyreview (at) gmail (dot) com.

Not a registered reader yet?  Its free, it gets you tables of contents sent by email twice per year, and it helps us demonstrate a growing readership. Please sign up and help the cause of OA journal publishing.

Nov 23

Website Visitation Statistics

Website Usage Stats to November 23, 2009

Nov 20

Arthur Lawton: Music on the Goshenhoppen Landscape

Congratulations go to IU Folklore doctoral student Arthur Lawton, whose latest article “Music on the Goshenhoppen Landscape” has just appeared in The Bulletin of the Historical Society of Montgomery County.

Nov 19

Brenda Johnson named Ruth Lilly Dean of Indiana University Libraries

As a person involved in a mix of collaborative projects with the Indiana University Libraries, I am pleased to note that the search for Ruth Lilly Dean of Indiana University Libraries has been concluded and that Brenda Johnson has agreed to join the Indiana University community in this key role. I look forward to working with her in the months and years ahead. Read the IU Press Release here. Congratulations to Dean Johnson and to the university.

Nov 11

Henry Glassie Named Haskins Prize Lecturer

Great news for my Department in the form of a ACLS press release circulated today.

 

Henry Glassie, College Professor Emeritus of Folklore at Indiana University, Bloomington, will deliver the 29th Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture at the 2011 ACLS Annual Meeting in Washington D.C.

Named for the first chairman of ACLS (1920-26), the Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture series, entitled “A Life of Learning,” celebrates scholarly careers of distinctive importance. The lectures are published in the ACLS Occasional Paper series. The list of previous lecturers includes John Hope Franklin, Gerda Lerner, Helen Vendler, Peter Brown, Clifford Geertz, and William Labov. Historian of science Nancy Siraisi will deliver the 2010 Haskins Prize Lecture at the ACLS Annual Meeting on May 7th in Philadelphia. Read more

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