• Digest: A Journal of Foodways and Culture Relaunches as Open Access Title
    Posted on Thu, 09/27/2012 - 2:02pm

    Many back issues of Digest, the journal of the Foodways section of the American Folklore Society were already available via IUScholarWorks Repository and discoverable via Open Folklore search, but the Open Folklore team is particularly excited to relay news that the journal has been relaunched as an open access journal title under the leadership of co-editors Michael Lange and Diane Tye.
    The editors note in their recent editorial: "The new Digest is the result of collaboration between the Department of Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland and the professional programs at Champlain College in Vermont. This innovative cooperative model divides the work between the two campuses, maximizing the resources and skills of both. The content editorial work will be handled at Memorial, drawing on the knowledge and experience of the folklore faculty members and graduate students. The layout, design, and publishing work will take place at Champlain, where the skills of professional majors such as Graphic Design, Web Design and Programming present the journal’s content in an attractive, functional, and professional form."

    Congratulations to all involved in this exciting work. Read the full announcement and the new journal issue that it accompanies online at http://digest.champlain.edu/index.html.

  • World Oral Literature Project, Open Book Publishers and UnGlue.It Release New, Open Edition of Oral Literature in Africa.
    Posted on Wed, 09/12/2012 - 2:00pm

    The World Oral Literature Project, a "Friend of Open Folklore" organization, and the UnGlue.It project, in partnership with Open Book Publishers, has just released a new open access edition of Ruth H. Finnegan's book Oral Literature in Africa. This is the first book to be successfully "unglued" through a crowdfunding scheme with the aim of making the book permanently and freely available to all in an open access edition. The new publication is accompanied by an freely accessible online archive of supporting media presented and preserved by the World Oral Literature Project.
    The book is available in PDF, EPUB and MOBI formats from both unglue.it and Open Book Publishers. Open Book Publishers is also selling a paperback and hardback edition. All versions are published under a CC-BY license.
    It is particularly exciting that the world's first unglued book is a study of folklore and that so many non-folklorists and non-anthropologist joined in the work of making it freely available. Two hundred and fifty seven contributors came together to give this book to the world. The group includes distinguished people from many fields, including fiction, history, archaeology, law, librarianship and many others.

    Congratulations to everyone involved in this exciting project.

  • Catching Up With Open Folklore: Project Report Spring 2012
    Posted on Tue, 06/12/2012 - 1:59pm

    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 Theoryis 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 Foodwaysand 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).

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