Enhancements and Accomplishments Announced for Open Folklore Project, Portal Site

The Open Folklore Project team is pleased to announce a series of enhancements to the Open Folklore portal site (www.openfolklore.org) and a cluster of recent accomplishments for the project as a whole. 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. As announced in March, the OF Project has been working toward the goal of unveiling these developments on April 1, 2011, about a half a year after the OF portal site was first launched at the 2010 AFS meetings. This announcement makes these developments public.

Friends of Open Folklore
As a project, OF has now expanded to recognize a new group of partner agencies. The first "Friends of Open Folklore" are four agencies that are systemically making available a growing body of open access folklore studies scholarship and doing so in a sophisticated way that allows for the ongoing, automated inclusion of information about this rich content in the OF Search tool. These first four OF Friends are: (1) the Center for Folklore Studies (at The Ohio State University), (2) the journal Ethnobotany Research and Applications (published at the University of Hawaii), (3) the National Folklore Support Centre (Chennai, India), and (4) the World Oral Literature Project (at the University of Cambridge). Thanks go to these organization for their work advancing open access scholarship in folklore studies and neighboring fields. The OF Project looks forward to the continued expansion of the OF Friends community.

New Content for OF Search
New content discoverable in OF search now includes the full range of books and journals published by the National Folklore Support Centre (NFSC). For this first time, OF search is making available content published in non-Western alphabets. This OF first comes with the inclusion of புதிய பனுவல்: An International Journal of Tamil Studies , one of the numerous journals published through the NFSC journal portal. Also new in OF Search is all of the published and white-paper material made available by the World Oral Literature Project and all of the content published in Ethnobotany Research and Applications.

In addition to this new material being made available in an ongoing and expanding way by these OF Friends, the AFS and IUB have made substantial amounts of additional scholarly material available for the field. Included here are a large collection of American Folklore Society annual meeting programs and abstract books, a growing collection of course syllabi developed and shared by folklorists, published indexes to the Journal of American Folklore, monographs on the history of folklore studies, and an important collection of reports and white papers relating to professional development in the field. This growing corpus of published and grey-literature materials builds upon earlier collections made available by the Fund for Folk Culture and other agencies.

Additional Content for the OF Archive-IT Collection
Important website content has been added to the OF Archive-It collection. Joining the sites already being preserved in Archive-It are the content-rich websites of the Institute for Community Partnerships, the Veterans History Project, and the American Folklife Center, including the sites for many of its rich and important American Memory projects. Work toward the inclusion of additional key websites in the field is underway.

Zotero Integration
The OF Search tool has been enhanced so that users can, with a single click, include bibliographic data from OF Search results into personal Zotero research libraries. Zotero is a widely used, freely-available open source software tool for scholarly research. It allows for powerful and easy management of research sources, note-taking, tagging, and other scholarly tasks. Zotero integration is in addition to the availability of tagged, XML, and BibTex data that has been a part of OF Search since the Portal's launch. These capacities allow for the use of other common bibliographic software programs. (Folklorists interested in learning more about Zotero are encouraged to consult the introductory materials at www.zotero.org

First OF Screencast
Beginning work developing how-to materials for the use of the OF Portal site, the OF Project Team has released the first of a series of web-based screencasts. The first seven-minute video illustrates how to use the OF Search tool for discovering and accessing freely available folklore studies scholarship. The screencast is available on the OF portal site, on YouTube, and for download from the IUB Libraries. In addition, a seven-minute overview of the OF project as a whole is also available as a screencast on YouTube. Screencasts illustrating the use of other OF resources are in development.

Additional Folklore Content in HathiTrust Digital Library
Behind the scenes, the OF Project Team and the Utah State University Library are continuing work making additional folklore scholarship available via the HathiTrust Digital Library.  Thousands of folklore studies works are now searchable in HathiTrust and an ever-growing number of these are fully accessible. Among the titles now available to all via HathiTrust are many valuable works published in the Memoirs of the American Folklore Society series, a venerable collection of works published by the AFS. At IUB Libraries, extensive work aimed at making older journal runs freely available in HathiTrust is continuing.

Other Behind the Scenes Projects
In partnership with the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, work continues on enhancing the Ethnographic Thesaurus (ET) and making it available through the OF Portal Site. Also, a Drupal-based workflow tracking system designed to help the OF team manage sub-projects and tasks has been set up and is now being used.

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, and especially the OF News section of the portal site) to share new 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).

Project goals for April 1, 2011 were selected from many options as those that seemed most important to the community, those that were within our means to accomplish quickly, and those that are needed to support OF's future progress. A new set of goals for fall 2011 will be announced soon.