Catching Up With Open Folklore: Project Report Spring 2012

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).