Websites
There are many web sites devoted to folklore and folklife, some created by academic programs or public sector and non-profit organizations, and others developed by enthusiasts and amateur interest groups. There is much of value in all of these sites, but they all suffer from two problems that all web sites are heir to. First, they are notoriously ephemeral and lack dependable preservation, making it difficult to reliably locate material after the passage of time. Second, generic Internet search engines like Google are not precise, especially in a popular field like folklore. This means that identifying reliable scholarly content in a sea of popular, and sometimes unreliable, online content poses a greater challenge for those interested in folklore topics than it does in other areas of scholarship.
The Open Folklore initiative will tackle these issues by selecting reliable, content-rich folklore web sites and creating searchable archive copies of them with the permission of the web site owners. This effort uses 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 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.
The successful eleventh-hour preservation of the Community Arts Network site has already demonstrated the value of this effort for folklorists and allied fields. In the next year, the Open Folklore partners will calculate the costs and seek funding sources to expand this effort. At the same time, we will seek advice from the folklore studies community on how to select and prioritize additional candidates for web archiving.
The Open Folklore initiative will tackle these issues by selecting reliable, content-rich folklore web sites and creating searchable archive copies of them with the permission of the web site owners. This effort uses 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 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.
To test the feasibility and usefulness of this approach, we have archived the websites for a number of organizations of interest to folklorists:
- American Folklife Center, Library of Congress
- American Folklore Society
- American Memory Projects, Library of Congress
- Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures (CSUMC)
- Community Arts Network
- Institute for Cultural Partnerships
- Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
- Veterans History Project, Library of Congress
- Western Folklife Center
The successful eleventh-hour preservation of the Community Arts Network site has already demonstrated the value of this effort for folklorists and allied fields. In the next year, the Open Folklore partners will calculate the costs and seek funding sources to expand this effort. At the same time, we will seek advice from the folklore studies community on how to select and prioritize additional candidates for web archiving.
