The Open Folklore team is happy to announce that a valuable collection of materials on current practice in, and the history of, folklore studies in the US is now available via Open Folklore: the American Folklore Society gray literature collection (“gray literature” refers to media not formally published or distributed, such as reports, works-in-progress, and conference materials). You can find this collection at https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/9004.
This collection includes:
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- Programs of, and reports on, every AFS annual meeting — one of the major annual professional conferences of folklorists in the world — from 1889 to the present
- Videos of major AFS annual meeting presentations since 2004
- Indexes to the main AFS journal, the Journal of American Folklore, published since 1888
- The full texts of nine other folklore journals published by AFS interest-group sections
- A collection of syllabi for undergraduate and graduate folklore courses
- Several publications on the history of the US field of folklore studies
- AFS annual reports and reports from AFS member surveys
- A variety of cultural policy, professional development, and consultancy reports from the field of folklore studies
We’ll update this collection as new material becomes available.
The AFS collection is just one example of how Open Folklore can make important materials from our field openly available. We want to hear from other organizations who’d like to work with us to make their own grey literature collections available to all.