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Posts from the ‘Scholarly Communication’ Category

Sep 12

What can the Open Folklore project help me do now? [3] (The Community Arts Network Edition)

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University Bloomington Libraries, and the American Folklore Society are pleased to announce that the CAN Web site has been archived as part of the Open Folklore project (http://www.openfolklore.org/).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.

Sep 12

Athabasca University Press!

Check out Athabasca University Press.

In keeping with Athabasca University’s mission of overcoming barriers to education, AU Press is committed to the open access dissemination of scholarship. “Open-access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions” (Suber, 2007). While AU Press publications are freely readable on our website, print versions are also available for sale.

From an academic author’s point of view, open access publication is compatible with traditional scholarly publication. It includes peer review, print, preservation, impact, and career advancement, and does not preclude material gain. AU Press books will be sold to libraries through electronic aggregators, who do pay royalties. Putting a scholar’s book on the web to be read for free increases both sales and citation impact. As well, many AU Press books are accompanied on our website by “podcast” interviews with their authors or editors—an innovative promotional tool.

Editors at AU Press work with emerging writers and researchers to promote success in scholarly publishing for traditionally underrepresented populations.

Scholars are invited to submit prospectuses to AU Press, c/o Walter Hildebrandt, Director. *

Thanks to everyone behind Athabasca University Press not only for publishing a pile of OA monographs, but for showing that this can be done and for helping the Public Knowledge Project develop Open Monograph Press, a tool that will help others follow this path.

Sep 8

Open Folklore, MAR Roundup

While the project partners (the American Folklore Society and the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries) continue building the inaugural Open Folklore site, discussion of the project has continued in several places. Here is a roundup of links. I especially wish to highlight the very detailed post published recently at Archivology.

Archivology (9-7-2010) Open Folklore, Open Access, and the Future of Scholarly Publishing

Library Babel Fish (8-23-2010) Open to Change: How Open Access Can Work

Archivology (8-9-2010) 5 suggestions for the Open Folklore project

Indiana Daily Student (8-4-2010) Open Folklore to uncover ‘gray literature’

Savage Minds (8-2-2010) Open Folklore

Museum Anthropology Review is published by the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries as part the IUScholarWorks program. I edit it in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology also at Indiana University. It thus lives within the ecology of the current core of Open Folklore and will get indexed, linked to, etc. along with other Open Folklore content.  (Lots of folklorists contribute to the journal too, by the way.) The recent round of discussion about scholarly communication in anthropology has led to some new discussion of Museum Anthropology Review. In addition to my own posts (below), I can note:

John Hawks Weblog (9-5-2010 ) Why don’t universities cut out the middleman?

Savage Minds (9-2-2010) Gourmet vs. All Things Considered: The anthropological edition

See also Archivology (9-7-2010) and Library Babel Fish (8-23-2010) given above.

Thanks to everyone who has been following, and offering encouragement to, these experiments.

Sep 7

Library Babel Fish on Scholarly Society Pubishing

Today’s Library Babel Fish column returns to the topic of the month: scholarly society publishing in general, with special attention to the discussion in anthropology that has been prompted by Bill Davis’ recent commentary on behalf of the American Anthropological Association. She makes a nice parallel to another area where the common good is endangered by legacy policy–hunger–and even mentions anthropologist Paul Farmer along the way. Check it out in connection with discussions at Savage Minds and John Hawks Weblog. Thanks Library Babel Fish.

Sep 4

1 Comment

DIY OA Superstar Laura Gibbs Making Stuff Happen for Lovers of Latin and Classical Folklore

And now for something else completely positive.

I got to know many nice and wonderful people during the time that I was on the faculty of the University of Oklahoma. One of them is Dr. Laura Gibbs. Laura is a classicist and a folklorist with an interest in new approaches to both university-level teaching and scholarly communications. Among the many things that illustrate how cool she is, I would point out that she is the most passionate language teacher I have ever seen. And the language that she is passionate about teaching is Latin.  How cool is that?  She goes all out for her students (and everyone is a potential student) whether or not those students happen to be enrolled in one of her classes.  When we were both actually on the OU campus, I would usually see her doing language tutorials with students in a campus coffee shop or someplace similar. (I am not at OU anymore and she mainly teaches online now.)

She is probably most famous for her new translation of Aesop’s Fables published by Oxford University Press, but I want to point to one of her newer book projects, a cool DIY OA book worth checking out even if (like me) you know nothing about Latin.

In a best of times, worst of times (for scholarly publishing) email discussion, she mentioned this project, telling me:

This summer I experimented with self-publishing a book at Lulu.com AND giving it away in PDF format. It’s the most fun I have ever had doing a book: Mille Fabulae et Una: 1001 Aesop’s Fables in Latin. The book is intended for Latin students and teachers; it’s a Latin language manual rather than a scholarly study, but it is based on a really serious survey of the whole scholarly and literary Latin Aesopic tradition, from ancient Rome up through the 19th century (including LOTS of Renaissance fables otherwise unavailable in any modern edition). It has worked out wonderfully, just as I had hoped. Some teachers have bought printed copies for themselves, but the main thing is this: thanks to teachers recommending the book as a free download for their students, there have been over 1600 downloads in just a few weeks. In the weird little world of post-classical Latin, that is a seriously large number. I am really happy! Plus, the fables look GREAT on handheld screens, so offering it as a PDF with the expectation that people might read the book on their iPhone or Android is something new and exciting for me.

The book itself is a celebration of public domain materials–basically me harvesting from GoogleBooks and other digital libraries–and now I am using my blog to link up the Latin texts to the hundreds of public domain images I have found at Internet Archive where the scans are good enough to justify reproducing the images for their own sake.

You can learn more about this project and see and get the book itself on her project website at http://millefabulae.blogspot.com/

When I asked Laura if I could share the story of her project, she replied enthusiastically and commented:

I love telling people about what I am doing because this is a time when people who love stories and music and art can learn and connect and share in ways that just were not easy to do even a few years ago. Now if somebody has a project they want to pursue, all they need is time and enthusiasm – that to me is why open access is important as a principle; if we can remove the access barriers, real education will take place, at last.

What more needs to be said?

In addition to the cool book and website, Laura has leveraged everyday blog features and other software to allow people to do such things as put a Latin fable of the day on their own blogs.  There is no end to what she has already created and tried to share with you (or at least with the vast world of budding classicists). Check out not only the 1001 Aesop’s Fable in Latin site, but also her main site where there are piles of stuff made just for you (and everybody else).

My elementary-age daughter and I have been systematically reading all of Andrew Lang’s so-called colored fairy books, thus I have to point to one more of Laura’s projects.  She has created a one-stop shop where you can go and not only get basic information on this series, but download (free) copies of all of the books in a very easy way.  Check that out at:  http://www.mythfolklore.net/andrewlang/

Thank you Laura for teaching in more ways than one! And thanks also to the folks at the University of Oklahoma who have supported Laura’s unusual and productive work as a teacher, technologist, and scholar.

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!

Sep 3

42 Cents? Really?

When Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Education published an article about Museum Anthropology Review (MAR) on February 28, 2008 he cited roughly the same costs comparison that Alex (Rex) Golub has  noted in his September 2, 2010 Savage Minds post. At least a few commentators on the IHE story in 2008 questioned the validity of the ridiculous figure that was being attributed to (and by) me as the (then) cost of publishing MAR.  I should have explained it then but Golub has given me a second chance. (thanks!)  Here goes as quickly as I am able.

As I noted in discussing Bill Davis’ recent post, most journals edited by employed scholars benefit from some kind of subsidies. Usually a rich and diverse array of subsidies. As with my earlier editing of Museum Anthropology, Museum Anthropology Review has benefited in a variety of ways from my being employed at Indiana University Bloomington. As things stand in 2010, the most important subsidy for the journal is the remarkable-super-awesome support provided to the journal by the Indiana University Blooming Libraries (and Librarians!) through the IUScholarWorks program.  The IUB Libraries are now MAR‘s publisher. They make this possible with the use of an amazing open source software program called Open Journal Systems (it does editorial work flow and publishing) and, very importantly, significant (but not insane) amounts of technical (and librarian-skills) support.  Set this wonderful background aside because it is not relevant to the source of the 42 cent thing.

It was the launch of the OJS-based, IUB Libraries-published instance of MAR that the IHE story was profiling/discussing. In other words, that story was about the version of MAR that exists today. In the IHE story I was quoted (accurately) as saying I spent “about $20” last year to publish a journal reaching many more people [than were being reached by Museum Anthropology].  What this meant literally, was that I spent about $20 out of my own pocket in 2007 to publish the content issued during 2007. This was the first year of a thing in the world called Museum Anthropology Review. What were the these costs?  I would have to take more time than I have now to figure out what went into the $20 figure, but I think that it was only a single expense (getting an ISSN is free, btw).  It was to purchase the domain name http://museumanthropology.net and to map it onto the free WordPress.com site that was used to get MAR up and running on the cheap.

That was it.  All other costs came were Indiana University Bloomington supports (thanks IU!).  For doubts and grouchiness as well as a fruitful discussion from IHE commentators on the economics of open access see most of the 19 comments that appeared in the wake of the IHE story. All I want to say about these comments now is that I never tried to suggest that the total cost of publishing a gold OA journal was $20 per year. I think that I have been completely obsessive about endlessly flagging for notice the important subsidies that host institutions provide to the publishing processes as hosts to academic editors. I discussed this issue in AAA editors meetings and I have spoken and written of them often. It is why I try to say thank you to the IUB Library staff at least once a week. (thank you!)  Put most simply in the MAR case, for the period from 2007 to 2010, those (library, department, college) subsidies (combined with a free blogging platform in 2007 and an open source software program in 2008-2010) were (together with the generous help of an authorial and peer-review community and a great editorial board) all that was required to publish MAR. It is likely that MAR‘s subsidy model will change and new partners will be hopefully be recruited in consortial fashion to help extend and expand the work we are doing, but what we have now is very stable and (I think) very successful. The IUScholarWorks team and I have plans to do a careful cost analysis of how much it costs to make MAR happen but it is undeniable that the costs are many orders of magnitude less than any current AAA publication. And they are being willingly taken up by the best research library in the United States. Why? Because the system we have known is broken and the librarians at IU want to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Oh yeah. And the journal is freely available to rich and poor.

To finish this up.  Golub is citing, for his MAR cost information, not the IHE story but the paper that I gave at a conference on circulation (ie. The Form of Value in Globalized Traditions) at the Ohio State University that was organized by Dorothy Noyes and Charles Briggs (thanks go to my hosts). This paper [Our Circulatory System (or Folklore Studies Publishing in the Era of Open Access, Corporate Enclosure and the Transformation of Scholarly Societies] was circulated via my website. The per page cost figure ($202) that I cited there for Museum Anthropology were my own estimates of the per page costs during the time of the publishing contract with the University of California Press. (Insert expression of deep appreciation to the nice people at UC Press Journals here.) Those figures were available to me as editor and were not covered by a confidentiality agreement (as my time as a Wiley editor is). At the time from which they come, everyone in the AAA was doing everything possible to make sense of the costs associated with AAA journal publishing because these costs were being paid directly by individual publishing sections.  The Council for Museum Anthropology had charged me with figuring out how to make Museum Anthropology work or to prepare for what to do when it died a financial death.

The paragraph in which I cite the $202 per page cost and the loss figure of $79 per page for Museum Anthropology was followed by the paragraph where I mention the 42 cents per article cost for Museum Anthropology Review. Unlike now, MAR did not (in its 2007 WordPress guise) have pages. It just had digital “entries” or (blog posts). This cost was (roughly, if memory serves) calculated by dividing the $20 out of pocket cost by the number of items (versus pages)  published that year at the time I made these calculations.  The more one published, the lower the per item cost would be.  I acknowledge that this has a rhetorical dimension, but that does not change the facts of the matter.  MAR reached and reaches a vast number of people and costs very little.  While MAR matured from its WordPress format (see the legacy site here) to the use of grown up, full-functioned Open Journal Systems, the WordPress version of MAR inspired Trickster Press (for instance) to shift publication of Folklore Forum to a similar WordPress arrangement.  This costs nothing and allows for the publication of color images, video, audio, conference posters, etc.–lots of good stuff.  Like MAR version 1.0 Folklore Forum content is preserved reliably in library approved ways in IUScholarWorks Repository (which uses DSpace and is fully compatible with Google Scholar).

This post is not intended as a complete unpacking of the history of Museum Anthropology Review.  That can come later.  I hope that it does explain the cost structure of the journal and contextualize the $20 or 42 cent business.

For those following the AAA story line, I will say one more thing.  Museum Anthropology Review is many things.  One of these is a purposeful experiment designed to generate reliable research findings on the viability of gold open access publishing in anthropology and neighboring fields.  It is not rocket science to see that it is structured to provide a very easy to grasp comparison with Museum Anthropology. (I did all that I could to succeed with Museum Anthropology and I am doing all that I can to succeed with MAR. The natural experiment aspect was highlighted in the IHE story.) MAR was founded with the blessing of the Council for Museum Anthropology as a possible successor to Museum Anthropology had that journal died during the section/cost crisis that preceded the Wiley partnership.

The deal with Wiley meant that Museum Anthropology would not end and, for the time being, it would continue as it had been. As a person who gave a vast amount to save that journal, I am glad that it still exists. My happiness in this is greatly reduced though knowing what I sacrificed to my Dean and others in order to gather additional subsidies aimed at balancing its books AND by my bitterness (yes, it is bitterness) at having these subsidies (and self-sacrifices of a significant professional sort) enclosed by Wiley and the AAA Executive Board without my having any voice in the matter.

So.  Museum Anthropology Review is, as Golub has sought to argue, a (modest and fallible) demonstration that another world is possible.  I cannot speak for them, but every sign suggests that the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries would have been happy to publish Museum Anthropology just as it now publishes Museum Anthropology Review.  Had such an alternative future been realized, Museum Anthropology might have generated no revenues, but it also might have generated no costs.  And, its content would have been freely available to everyone with the capacity to get online.

Neither MAR nor Museum Anthropology are flagship journals with impact factor rankings (yet).  It is easy to imagine that the American Ethnologist (for instance) somehow just has to be different, more complicated, more expensive.  But if it were published using Open Journal Systems in a AAA+Library partnership in an open access format available to all of the world, it would not loose its status as a premier journal with an impressive impact factor ranking.  It would not have to stop publishing four issues a year. The best authors and peer-reviewers and editors would still, presumably, want to be involved with it.  There would be additional costs, but they would be totally addressable with dues money and other subsidies. (For example, AE does and MAR does not yet use DOI numbers. This is a cost and benefit that MAR needs to start taking on soon.)

Anyone who has read this far belongs to the choir and I will stop preaching now. My thanks go to everyone who is working to solve the massive problems that the scholarly communication system and the scholarly society system and the research library system are facing.

Sep 2

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[On] Free [AAA] Journal Access as a Public Issue

A discussion of the future of scholarly publishing within the American Anthropological Association is underway in a small way on the AAA’s blog, where an editorial by AAA Executive Director Bill Davis (“Free Journal Access as a Public Issue”) has been posted. I have made a couple of comments there but do not want to overwhelm the conversation that might (I hope) happen there with an additional long comment post. For anyone who might be interested, here is a comment that can be spliced in after the first note offered there by AAA Director of Publishing Oona Schmid.

…

Bill Davis begins with a discussion of green OA deposit mandates and then transitions pretty quickly to a discussion of gold OA journal publishing. The literature on varieties of OA makes clear that these are rather different matters and readers of this discussion may (as often happens) conflate them. Advocates of green OA deposit frameworks outside anthropology have noted that the AAA author agreement has been, for several years now, a fully green one (in SHERPA/RoMEO terms) and thus the AAA is fully ready, in legal terms, to enable AAA authors to easily comply with any of the kinds of (funder and institutional) mandates that have been discussed or implemented.

Green OA generally involves making pre-prints or post-prints (these are terms of art that can be unpacked at the SHERPA website) freely available online, not final publisher versions. Very few AAA authors are exercising their deposit rights at present and, when the do, they are typically doing so in less than ideal ways–that is, they are placing the final published PDF online (the author agreement does not allow for this) and (generally) they are not using reliable institutional repositories, opting instead for personal websites. (That the AAA is not policing author misappropriations of the value-added published PDFs just increases confusion about what is and is not legal, thereby stymying better understanding of the important issues that the AAA and its publishing system  faces and producing more low level lawlessness.)

The concerns that Bill Davis is evoking do not actually stem from government mandated gold open access (there is no such thing, even as a proposal) but from a hypothetical future situation in which actual use of green OA deposit (if mandated) becomes sufficiently ubiquitous that people stop needing or wanting toll access, value-added publisher versions. I think that such matters are worthy of thinking about, but they are not happening right here right now and it does not help us to think about these matters to evoke a more direct linkage than actually exists.  There is not an open access lobby working hard to push through U.S. law aimed at forcing the AAA or anyone else to give away value-added publications in a gold OA framework (i.e. free online journals). The national legal and policy questions are about open accessibility of manuscript versions of federally funded research articles. Davis’ own essay provides evidence showing that 2/3 of AA authors would not be affected by such U.S. mandates. Low use of the pre-print deposit options provided by the AAA author agreement suggests that there is no immediate danger stemming from voluntary author-by-author pursuit of green OA deposit.

Lobbying for OA (both green and gold) among anthropologists, by anthropologists is a different matter altogether. It is not about federal mandates, it is about (discussing, at least) larger matters relating to the ethics, technology, and political economy of scholarly communications and engaging with the future life of scholarly societies, including the AAA. This is a point that Chris Kelty has made over and over again and that was the focus of the article that he and others (I was one) published in Cultural Anthropology. That paper had much positive effect on the discussion in other societies but apparently no impact of any kind within the AAA ($4000-$6000 wasted, I guess). [Impact here is being measured not in terms of shaping ideas and actions, but much less impressively in terms of anyone involved in AAA governance acknowledging that something had been said.]

Oona Schmid reports that the AAA does not produce any surplus revenue from the publishing program.  That is a straight forward answer to a complicated question. Engaging with the details at issue is difficult even for those AAA leaders who have access to a lot of lines of data.  Separate from that important and difficult work, it is possible to observe that our publishing partner would not be our publishing partner if we were not a source of surplus revenue for it. It reported 2009 revenues of over 1.6 trillion dollars and net income of 128 million dollars.  The many subsidies that Oona and I have discussed above (i.e. in earlier comments on the Davis post) contribute, across all disciplines and fields, to enhancing this profit position. Institutional subsidies, along with the free labor of anthropologists, their consultants, (and other scholars), along with our dues money, along with the investments of research funders and the students whose tuition dollars pay the bills at college and university libraries enhance the earnings picture in an industry that has seen very steady rises in revenue and income growth. As an association, we made a decision to more fully join this part of the system. We did so for particular reasons in a particular moment in association and world history.

Doing so opened some opportunities and foreclosed on some others. I think that we will discover that the benefits of doing so accrued at the beginning of this current period and that the hidden costs will come further down the line. Kim Fortun has written of such themes more eloquently that I can. She is hardly alone in trying over the past several years to participate in a conversation aimed at formulating “a strategy to sustain AAA’s traditional journal publishing role as we engage with a world that expects scholarly content to be “free.”” No past efforts along these lines have ever been acknowledged, or even condemned as completely wrongheaded by the AAA leadership. The more elaborate and engaged the intervention, the greater the official silence it generates. Maybe this new invitation to dialogue and the work that CFPEP and the Board did at the May meeting can stand as a turning point.

This comment was written (and sat on overnight) before the second comment by Barbara and the first comment by Chris Kelty.

Aug 24

Library Babel Fish on Open Folklore and Neighboring Discussions

Barbara Fister in her regular column on library and scholarly communications issues for Inside Higher Education (Library Babel Fish) has focused today on Open Folklore and a cluster of neighboring discussions, projects, articles, and memos relating to scholarly communications in folklore studies, anthropology, media studies, and in general. In addition to commenting on Open Folklore, she connects to (among other things) my IUB colleague (1) Ted Striphas’ article on scholarly communications in media studies [discussed here and oa here], (2) discussion of these issues at Savage Minds, (3) Kim Fortun’s memo on these matters within the American Anthropological Association, and (4) my essay on scholarly communications in folklore studies. That she could make these connections without having discussed the linkages with me (we have not communicated previously except for my comment on her post last week) is a testimony to the power of scholarly communications in a open and networked environment.

Her essay is titled Open to Change: How Open Access Can Work. It can be found here: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library_babel_fish/open_to_change_how_open_access_can_work

Thanks to Barbara for highlighting these projects and discussions so prominently.

Aug 13

1 Comment

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.

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