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News from the Quiet PhasePosted on Sat, 08/15/2015 - 11:02am
Open Folklore's quiet phase will continue for a bit longer, but we cannot resist reporting that a lot of new work is underway and some great new people have joined the OF team. We look forward to explaining more about the details in the months ahead, but for now just know that some neat things are happening behind the scenes. The OF team looks forward to seeing many colleagues at the 2015 American Folklore Society annual meetings in Long Beach, California in October.
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Remembering OF Team Member Garett MontanezPosted on Thu, 07/02/2015 - 11:06am
It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Garett Montanez, a beloved and valued member of the Open Folklore Team. Garett made enormous contributions to the project as its Technology Lead, including the design and implementation of the web site as well as the associated “Search” feature. As excellent and outstanding as those professional contributions were, however, Garett’s personal qualities will remain even longer in our hearts and minds. His remarkable goodwill, generosity, constant smile, and his absolutely guaranteed optimism, carried us through many rough patches. Every time we asked if he could add new features (and there were many of these requests, small and big alike,) we learned to expect his standard response, “Sure, we can do that!” And in fact, not only did he say it, he did it. Always. His colleagues on the Open Folklore Team join the many others who were fortunate to know him in expressing our sadness at his passing and the knowledge that we will miss him greatly.
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Open Folklore Web Archive Collection Grows Past 100 SitesPosted on Sun, 10/12/2014 - 11:53am(Written by Moria Smith and Cross-posted from the AFS Review)Websites contain valuable information for research and for documenting the history of the field of folklore studies. But they are ephemeral; they may change rapidly or even disappear. Anyone who cites information disseminated in websites as either primary or secondary data, for example, soon discovers that "link rot" is a significant problem.
Web archives capture snapshots of websites as they appeared at a particular moment. Researchers can use the resulting archives as a searchable index of websites both past and present, including websites that have changed. Web archives also provide a persistent citation to a site that existed at a specific time (thus avoiding link rot), and they allow access to websites that are temporarily down or permanently departed.
The Open Folklore Web Archive is a searchable collection of archived copies of websites that are of research value or institutional importance to folklorists. Collecting began in 2010 and is continuing, using the Archive-It service from the Internet Archive. The archive consists of two collections (https://archive-it.org/collections/2077 and https://archive-it.org/collections/2843) that together contain over 100 websites selected for their research value or institutional importance to the field.
So far, the collection has two areas of emphasis, both directed toward the goal of capturing and making accessible the institutional history of the field:
1. Websites of academic folklore programs
2. Websites of public, folk, and vernacular arts organizations, both government-sponsored and private not-for-profit. We based our initial selection on Gregory Hansen’s “Webography of Public Folklore Resources,” Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World, ed. Trevor J. Blank (Utah State University Press, 2009):213-230.
In the last 6 months, the Open Folklore team has archived the following 48 new sites for the collection, raising the total collection to 115 sites:
Alaska Native Heritage Center - http://alaskanative.net
Arts Center of Cannon County (Tennessee) - http://www.artscenterofcc.com
Blue Ridge Institute and Museum of Ferrum College (Virginia)- http://www.blueridgeinstitute.org
California Indian Basketweavers Association - http://www.ciba.org
California Traditional Music Society - http://www.ctmsfolkmusic.org
Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum (Maryland) - http://www.cbmm.org
Chinavine - http://www.chinavine.org
Department of Arkansas Heritage - http://www.arkansasheritage.com/
George Washington University Department of American Studies (District of Columbia) - http://departments.columbian.gwu.edu/americanstudies/
Georgia Council for the Arts - http://www.gaarts.org
Illinois Arts Council - http://www.state.il.us/agency/iac
Institute for Community Research (Connecticut) - http://www.incommunityresearch.org
Iowa Arts Council - http://www.iowaartscouncil.org
Jubilee Community Arts at the Laurel Theatre (Tennessee) - http://www.jubileearts.org
Kansas State Historical Society - http://www.kshs.org
Kentucky Historical Society - http://history.ky.gov
Louisiana Folklife Center - http://www.nsula.edu/folklife
Maine Arts Commission - http://mainearts.maine.gov
Massachusetts Cultural Council - http://www.massculturalcouncil.org
Mississippi Arts Commission - http://www.arts.state.ms.us
Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians - http://www.choctaw.org
Mississippi Cultural Crossroads - http://www.msculturalcrossroads.org
Missouri Folk Arts Program - http://maa.missouri.edu/mfap
Missouri Historical Society - http://www.mohistory.org
Museum of International Folk Art (New Mexico) - http://www.moifa.org
New England Foundation for the Arts - http://www.nefa.org
North Carolina Folklife Institute - http://www.ncfolk.org
North Dakota Council for the Arts - http://www.state.nd.us/arts
Northwest Folklife (Washington State) - http://www.nwfolklife.org
Northwest Heritage Resources (Washington State) - http://www.northwestheritageresources.org
Northwest Native American Basketweavers Association - http://www.nnaba.org
Ozark Studies Institute (Missouri) - http://ozarksstudies.missouristate.edu/programs.htm
Philadelphia Folksong Society - http://www.pfs.org
Rangeley Regions Logging Museum (Maine) - http://www.rlrlm.org
Rhode Island State Council on the Arts - http://www.arts.ri.gov/folkarts
Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area (Pennsylvania) - http://www.riversofsteel.com
Rose Center and Council for the Arts (Tennessee) - http://www.rosecenter.org
Sealaska Heritage Institute (Alaska)- http://www.sealaskaheritage.org
South Georgia Folklife Collection - http://www.valdosta.edu/library/find/arch/folklife/index.html
Talking Across the Lines - http://www.folktalk.org
Texas Folklife - http://www.texasfolklife.org
The Folklife Center at Crandall Public Library (New York State) - http://www.crandalllibrary.org/folklife
Traditional Arts in Upstate New York - http://www.tauny.org
Tuckerton Seaport and Baymen's Museum (New Jersey) - http://www.tuckertonseaport.org
University of Kentucky Modern & Classic Languages, Literatures & Cultures - http://mcl.as.uky.edu
Virginia Folklife Program - http://www.virginiafolklife.org
Ward Museum of Wildfowl Art (Maryland) - http://www.wardmuseum.org
Washington State Arts Commission - http://www.arts.wa.gov
To recommend other sites for this collection, please contact Open Folklore team member Moira Marsh at molsmith@indiana.edu.
Founded in 2010, Open Folklore (www.openfolklore.org), an award-winning partnership of the American Folklore Society and the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries, is a scholarly communications effort to make a greater number and variety of useful resources available to folklorists and the communities with which folklorists partner. Open Folklore offers a single point of access to a growing universe of folklore studies scholarship and public education in books, journals, websites, and gray literature, and to information about open-access communications in folklore studies and beyond.
To learn more, attend the Open Folklore session at next month’s AFS annual meeting in Santa Fe (Exploring Open Access Folklore Scholarship I: How Open Folklore Can Help You To Be a Smarter (!) Folklorist, Session 01-03, Thursday, November 6, 8:00-10:00 am).
