Open Folklore News

Many back issues of Digest, the journal of the Foodways section of the American Folklore Society were already available via IUScholarWorks Repository and discoverable via Open Folklore search, but the Open Folklore team is particularly excited to relay news that the journal has been relaunched as an open access journal title under the leadership of co-editors Michael Lange and Diane Tye.

The editors note in their recent editorial: "The new Digest is the result of collaboration between the Department of Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland and the professional programs at Champlain College in Vermont. This innovative cooperative model divides the work between the two campuses, maximizing the resources and skills of both. The content editorial work will be handled at Memorial, drawing on the knowledge and experience of the folklore faculty members and graduate students. The layout, design, and publishing work will take place at Champlain, where the skills of professional majors such as Graphic Design, Web Design and Programming present the journal’s content in an attractive, functional, and professional form."

Congratulations to all involved in this exciting work. Read the full announcement and the new journal issue that it accompanies online at http://digest.champlain.edu/index.html.

Since the time of the fall 2011 report to the community, Open Folklore has continued its work to extend the benefits of open access to the folklore studies community and to the diverse stakeholders with whom folklorists partner. Here are some highlights on the project's work over the past eight months.

New Partners and New Harvested Content

Two new partners have joined the Open Folklore community as "Friends of Open Folklore." Scholarly content from these partners is now discoverable via the Open Folklore search tool.

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory is now part of the Open Folklore universe. HAU is a new gold open access journal published by a consortium committed to the development of theoretical perspectives that are grounded in sophisticated ethnographic fieldwork. HAU is a new journal that launched last fall.

Another new partner is the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, the scholarly association that publishes the journal Tipití. Tipití is the only refereed journal dedicated to the study of the societies of lowland South America. The journal has been published in its current form since 2003 and is being made open access through the Digital Commons repository at Trinity University.

Additional Content from the American Folklore Society

New AFS materials made available during the most recent reporting period include a collection of "Best Practice and Case Study Reports" deriving from a program of consultancies supported since 2009 with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, a collection of "Professional Development Publications," and a collection of society publications on the "History of U.S. Folklore Studies."

Extended runs of two more of the Society's section journals have also been made available in open access formats. These titles are Digest: An Interdisciplinary Study of Food and Foodways and the Public Programs Bulletin.

All of this AFS content has been deposited in the IUScholarWorks Repository and is thereby discoverable via Open Folklore Search. It can also be accessed via the IUScholarWorks Repository.

Open Folklore Content in Archive-It

The Open Folklore team continues to work to preserve key folklore studies-related websites through the Open Folklore collection in Archive-It, the media rich archiving service offered by the Internet Archive. This work has resulted in preservation copies of the websites for:

• The Center for Folklore Studies at the Ohio State University
• City Lore
• The Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures
• The Folklore Program at the University of Oregon
• The University of Wisconsin Folklore Program
• The American Studies Program at Penn State Harrisburg
• The Mid Atlantic Folk Arts Forum
• The Museum Anthropology Review Weblog
• The Alliance for California Traditional Arts
• The Peter and Doris Kule Centre for Ukrainian and Canadian Folklore
• The International Society for Folk Narrative Research
• The Civil Rights History Project
• Local Learning
• Folklife in Louisiana
• Keepers of Tradition
• Memorial University of Newfoundland Department of Folklore
• New York Folklore Society
• Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts
• The University of Pennsylvania Graduate Program in Folklore and Folklife
• Georgia State University Heritage Preservation Program

These archived websites are in addition to those websites archived and announced previously. In-kind support from the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries makes use of the Archive-It service possible.

The Open Folklore team thanks Sara Naslund and Jennie Crowley, both students in the Indiana University School of Library and Information Science, for this excellent work on the OF Archive-It Collection during 2012-2013.

Outreach Activities

Since the last biannual report, the Open Folklore team has been busy speaking about the project in a range of venues.

Librarians from the Open Folklore team led two "Learning With Librarians" sessions at the AFS annual meetings in Bloomington. One was "An Introduction to Copyright, Intellectual Property, and Open Folklore" and the other was "An Introduction to Digital Humanities and Online Information Resources."

Last October, OF team member Moria Marsh presented "Open Folklore Project–Collection Development, But Not as Your Father Knew It" during the 2011 Archive-It Partners meeting in Louisville, KY.

At the 2011 meetings of the American Anthropological Association, OF team member Jason Baird Jackson presented "Another World is Possible: Open Folklore as Library-Scholarly Society Partnership" as part of the panel "Digital Anthropologies: Projects and Projections" and is now available on Jackson's website.

The Open Folklore project was one of a number of projects discussed at an April 2012 event hosted by the University of Minnesota Libraries, with co-sponsorship from the UMN Department of Anthropology. The event was titled Open Research and Learning: Collaboration, Connections and Communities and it focused on the social side of open access, open educational resources, and open research architectures and collaborations. In his remarks, OF team member Jason Baird Jackson discussed not only OF, but also the social nature of research-focused group blogs and the implications of new journal publishing strategies such as those central to the PressForward project and its associated Digital Humanities Now and Journal of Digital Humanities
efforts.

In May 2012, Moira Marsh represented Open Folklore at a “Web Archiving Summit” held by invitation at Columbia University. This meeting included librarians and archivists from key institutions engaged in harvesting and archiving web content who discussed high-level programmatic issues of objectives, scope, policies,,and methods for this work.  

Keeping in Touch

The OF Project Team, Strategic Partner, and OF Friends share the goals of keeping the community informed about work on OF and receiving continuous input and feedback. We will continue to use the OF news tools (Facebook, Twitter (@openfolklore), and especially the OF News section of the portal site) to share news about OF goals and next steps about every six months. Feedback and comments are always welcome by email, weblog post, Facebook comment, and good old fashioned mail (℅ either the IUScholarWorks Project at the IUB Libraries or the AFS Office).

The Open Folklore project was one of a number of projects discussed at a recent event hosted by the University of Minnesota Libraries, with co-sponsorship from the UMN Department of Anthropology. The event was titled Open Research and Learning: Collaboration, Connections and Communities and it focused on the social side of open access, open educational resources, and open research architectures and collaborations.

In his remarks, OF team member Jason Baird Jackson discussed not only OF, but also the social nature of research-focused group blogs and the implications of new journal publishing strategies such as those central to the PressForward project and its associated Digital Humanities Now and Journal of Digital Humanities efforts.

Amazing presentations were offered by Doug Armato (Director of the University of Minnesota Press, focusing on the transformation of university presses in the context of shifts to open access approaches to scholarly communication), David Ernst (Director of Academic and Information Technology for the UMN College of Education and Human Development, describing the UMN's new open textbook project) and Lucy Fortson (Associate Professor, UMN School of Physics and Astronomy, discussing remarkably successful open data-based citizen science collaborations, particularly the Galaxy Zoo project and related Zooniverse projects). UMN Copyright Librarian Nancy Sims moderated the panel.

For those who are interested in a recap of the event, Barbara Fister has offered one in a new essay published at Inside Higher Education. She starts from the substance of the panel and proceeds to offer reflections on the nature of undergraduate learning and research in a changing information environment. Find her essay in Inside Higher Education.

The basic information on the event is available from the UMN Library website.

In an essay reflecting on the future of Libraries, written for Library Journal ("The Shock of the Old"), Barbara Fister has highlighted Open Folklore as one of many signs pointing to the kind of future that librarians and scholars want to build together. She writes:
I am encouraged by the launch of new platforms like PressForward and PressBooks and Annotum that seem to be popping up everywhere, creative and simple engines for publishing in new ways. I’m excited by Open Folklore and Invisible Australians and other projects that see openness as a feature, not a bug. Just as traditional publishers are gearing up for a digital future that limits access artificially to protect profits, innovative scholars are dreaming up new ways to share academic work.
Barbara has been one of the closest observers of the Open Folklore project. Her encouragement and feedback, especially in the context of her larger surveys of what is happening in libraries and scholarly communication have been invaluable. Her regular essays for Library Journal and Inside Higher Education are a major resource.

One year ago, on October 13, 2010, the American Folklore Society (AFS) and the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries launched the Open Folklore project and its associated web portal, located at www.openfolklore.org. A lot has been accomplished over the past year. Building on a six-month update released April 1, 2011, this announcement highlights the latest enhancements to the Open Folklore portal site and the most recent accomplishments of the project.

Aimed at fostering open access scholarship in the field of folklore studies, Open Folklore (OF) is a collaborative project led by the American Folklore Society (AFS) and the Indiana University Bloomington (IUB) Libraries. The Utah State University (USU) Libraries, of which the USU Press and USU Special Collections are key parts, is a Strategic Partner in the OF project.

Outstanding Collaboration Award

The OF partners and friends are pleased that the project was recognized at the summer 2011 meetings of the American Library Association with the "Outstanding Collaboration Award" presented by the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS). In highlighting the project, ALCTS noted:

"In a noteworthy collaborative effort, the Open Folklore Project has fulfilled a scholarly need by establishing an online portal to provide open online access to many useful, but heretofore difficult to access, research materials in the field of folklore studies. Research materials include books, journals, “gray (unpublished) literature”, and web sites. The Open Folklore Project serves as a new model for collection development and scholarly communication for building discipline-based digital collections. Besides providing open access to research materials, the portal offers full-text searching and allows folklore scholars and enthusiasts to identify and select reliable scholarly content, differentiating it from popular, and sometimes, unreliable, online search engine content. This project actively works to encourage partnerships to collaboratively digitize materials, place them in open-access digital repositories, and share them with the folklore community. The Open Folklore Project can proudly serve as a model for collaborative projects in other scholarly disciplines."

AFS and IU Libraries are thrilled that the library community so generously and enthusiastically recognized early the goals and partnership strategies underpinning the OF effort.

The AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus (ET)

The AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus (AFSET) is now out of its beta-testing phase and is fully operational and usable as a controlled vocabulary tool for folklore studies and related ethnographic disciplines. The AFSET is live and accessible from a dedicated tab at the OF portal site. Now that it is available as a stable resource, the AFSET will also begin to figure more prominently in the publishing and database work of various projects affiliated with Open Folklore, including IUScholarWorks and The Journal of American Folklore—the flagship journal of the AFS. Tutorial resources to help scholars and project teams in their utilization of the AFSET will be developed in the year ahead.

Work on the AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus was supported by a generous grant from the Scholarly Communications Program of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and early planning-grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The AFS developed the Thesaurus in cooperation with the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress and its incorporation into the OF portal was made possible through the combined efforts of the AFSET development team and the IU Digital Library Program. Thanks go to all who supported the project on its journey to official release.

New Scholarly Content from AFS and IUScholarWorks Repository

Over the past six months, a large body of new scholarly content has been incorporated into the Open Folklore universe. Most prominent in this additional scholarly material are publications issued over many decades by the AFS. Much new AFS material has been included in the IUScholarWorks Repository as part of the repository's AFS "community."

A key addition to the AFS community in IUScholarWorks Repository is a large corpus of syllabi developed for folklore and folklife courses at all levels by AFS members. This is a collection that will continue to grow in the years ahead, The Folklore Teaching Resources Collection presently includes 55 contributions from a diversity of folklore scholars. These resources are fully discoverable via Open Folklore Search. They are also browsable in IUScholarWorks Repository.

A remarkable addition to the group of AFS materials being made available through the IUScholarWorks Repository are a nearly complete set of documents chronicling the Society's annual meetings going back to 1889. For recent years, these are the printed meeting programs but, for the early years, rich narrative accounts of the meetings that were originally published in The Journal of American Folklore are now freely available. These meetings-related materials—priceless resources for both the history of the field and for the pursuit of current research—are fully discoverable via Open Folklore Search. They are also browsable in IUScholarWorks Repository.

A few small gaps in the continuous record remain and the OF team is now working toward providing access to annual meeting program books for those missing from the 1950s and for the 1975-2003 period.

Among the other new AFS content additions are the backfiles of a key journal, Children's Folklore Review (1990-2006) and its predecessor the Children's Folklore Newsletter (1979-1990). This content is now fully accessible in IUScholarWorks Repository and searchable at the issue level via Open Folklore Search.

Continued progress is being made toward the goal of making the back files of all of the AFS's section journals freely available online, either as part of the IUScholarWorks Repository or the HathiTrust Digital Library.

New Scholarly Content Available via Google Books

Some folklore journal titles, including others among the corpus of AFS section publications that are available within the HathiTrust Digital Library, are now also available via Google Books. The content newly accessible via Google Books includes Keystone Folklore, Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review, Folklore Historian, and some issues of Digest. Finding aids to assist users in accessing these journals within Google Books will be made available in IUScholarWorks and the Open Folklore Portal next week. Stay tuned for details.

New Scholarly Content Added to the OF Archive-It Collection

Since the project's last report on additional OF content in Archive-It, a number of additional folklore studies websites have been permanently archived and made accessible via this unique service. The newest additions to the OF Archive-It Collection are the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Culture and Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Inclusion of The Quilt Index will be completed soon. Access to the archived websites can be gained from the Websites tab at the Open Folklore portal or directly within Archive-It.

A New OF Screencast

The second in a series of OF tutorial screencasts has been produced and released. Focusing on accessing open access journals in folklore and ethnology via the OF portal site, the video can be found embedded in the OF portal site (here), downloadable from Indiana Universities (here), and on the YouTube video service (here). Additional screencasts will be produced in the year ahead.

Portal Site Changes

Regular visitors to the portal site will also notice some small changes designed to improve functionality and organization, as well as to accommodate the new addition of the AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus to the site.

JEF Joins the Friends of OF

In May, the Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics joined the community of OF friends. JEF, published by the Estonian National Museum, the Estonian Literary Museum and the University of Tartu is published using Open Journal Systems and is fully interoperable with Open Folklore Search, meaning that JEF content is fully discoverable via the OF portal and is harvested for discovery on an ongoing basis.

OF at the AFS Meetings

Release of these developments has been timed to fall right before the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society, which will take place at Indiana University Bloomington on October 12-15, 2011.

Indiana University librarians from the Open Folklore team will be leading two Learning With Librarians sessions at the AFS annual meetings in Bloomington: An Introduction to Copyright, Intellectual Property, and Open Folklore; and An Introduction to Digital Humanities and Online Information Resources.

At the meetings, we hope to have opportunities to talk with the folklore community about where the Open Folklore project is headed and to gather input on the work to be pursued in the year ahead. Year one was great. The year ahead will be even better!

Keeping in Touch

The OF Project Team, Strategic Partner, and OF Friends share the goals of keeping the community informed about work on OF and receiving continuous input and feedback. We will continue to use the OF news tools (Facebook, Twitter (@openfolklore), and especially the OF News section of the portal site) to share news about OF goals and next steps about every six months. Feedback and comments are always welcome by email, weblog post, Facebook comment, and good old fashioned mail (℅ either the IUScholarWorks Project at the IUB Libraries or the AFS Office).

What follows is an American Folklore Society announcement concerning the Ethnographic Thesaurus and the Open Folklore project:

The AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus (www.openfolklore.org/et/) is now available in a beta version on the Open Folklore (www.openfolklore.org/) portal, a collaborative effort of the Society, the Indiana University-Bloomington Libraries, and the Indiana University Digital Library Program.

The post-beta version, the AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus 2.0, will be available on that same URL on October 1, 2011.

The AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus is a searchable online vocabulary that can be used to improve access to information about folklore, ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, and related fields. Supported by a generous grant from the Scholarly Communications Program of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and early planning-grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Folklore Society developed the Thesaurus in cooperation with the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress.

AFS thankfully recognizes the dedicated work of the Thesaurus editorial board, the IU-B Libraries, and the IU Digital Library Program to transfer the AFSET to its new home. This work has strengthened Open Folklore as a direct provider of useful tools for folklore studies and related fields, as well as a search-and-discovery tool for online content available elsewhere.

The current beta version incorporates the AFSET editorial board's revisions of the following facets: art, belief, dance, disciplines, entertainment and recreation, foodways, health, language, law and governance, material culture, music, performance, ritual, social dynamics, transmission, verbal arts, and literature.

The editorial board will be completing the review of these remaining facets before launch of the AFSET 2.0 on October 1: general; beings; documentation; education; migration and settlement; research, theory and methodology; space and place; time; and work.

AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus Editorial Board

(all of the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, DC)

Catherine Hiebert Kerst, Folklife Specialist/Archivist
Maggie Kruesi, Cataloger
Michael Taft, Head of the Archive

The Open Folklore team is please to announce the newest "Friend of Open Folklore."

As noted on the journal's homepage: "Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics (JEF) is a multidisciplinary forum for scholars. Addressed to an international scholarly audience, JEF is open to contributions from researchers all over the world. JEF publishes articles in the research areas of ethnology, folkloristics, museology, cultural and social anthropology. It includes both studies focused on the empirical analysis of particular cases as well as those more theoretically oriented. JEF is a peer-reviewed journal, issued two times per year. JEF is the joint publication of the Estonian National Museum, the Estonian Literary Museum and the University of Tartu."

JEF context is now fully indexed in Open Folklore Search and new content going forward will also be discoverable using this tool. Congratulations to the JEF editor Ergo-Hart Västrik and the JEF editorial team on the journal's recent migration to Open Journal Systems (OJS), the open source software tool that is used by many gold open access journals. OJS utilizes the Open Archives Initiative-Protocols for Metadata Harvesting and it is this protocol that allows projects like Open Folklore to harvest journal metadata for inclusion in tools like OF Search. Our thanks goes to the JEF team for their leadership in gold open access publishing and we are thrilled to be working with them in advancing the cause of open access scholarly communications in folklore studies and ethnology.

Find the JEF journal site at: http://www.jef.ee/index.php/journal

Since its launch last fall, the Open Folklore project has been continuing its work vigorously. We set a goal of unveiling a batch of new features on the portal site (www.openfolklore.org) and profiling several content accomplishments on April 1. We will explain these in detail then but we cannot resist offering a brief preview now.

Our communications goal is to keep the community informed of our intentions, and to receive continuous input and feedback. We will use the OF news tools (Facebook, Twitter, and especially the OF News section of the portal site) to tell you about our goals and next steps every six months or so.

Project goals for April 1, 2011 were selected from many options as those most important to the community; those that are within our means to accomplish quickly, and those that are needed to support our progress in the future.

Highlights among the Spring 2011 goals are:

• Harvesting additional repository and journal content in OF Search.
• Facilitating easy use of Zotero (www.zotero.org) for users of OF Search.
• Refining the process by which existing journal context is liberated inside the HathitTrust Digital Library and the Google Books project.
• Developing tutorials and other promotional materials to help people learn about the project and use the portal site.
• Launching the “Friends of Open Folklore” initiative.
• Advancing the “gray literature” initiative and making available a least one collection of gray literature materials via OF Search.
• Add additional websites to the Open Folklore collection in Archive-It.
• Include the initial collection of folklore studies syllabi donated by AFS members in IUScholarWorks Repository and make them discoverable and accessible via OF Search.
• Complete work on a backend system for tracking in-progress tasks and projects central to the future development of Open Folklore.
• Beginning work integrating the Ethnographic Thesaurus into the Open Folklore network.
  

In a new article in Library Journal, Barbara Fister offers a very thoughtful discussion of the current scene in university libraries and highlights the promise of projects like Open Folklore. Read all about it http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/home/889330-264/what_a_provost_could_do.html.csp .

"Encompassing advocacy, education, access, collection development, description, searching and many other familiar enterprises in our community, it combines them in new and innovative ways," he said. "Open Folklore is an example of the spectacular things that can be achieved together but which are entirely impossible alone."

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 
Jan. 27, 2011

From the Indiana University Press release available here.