The American Folklore Society (AFS) and the Indiana University
Bloomington Libraries are creating a prototype of a new scholarly
resource called Open Folklore. The vision for this open-access online
portal for folklore studies is to make a greater number and variety of
useful resources, both published and unpublished, available for the
field of folklore studies and the communities with which folklore
scholars partner. In its full form, we intend for Open Folklore to be a
multi-faceted project that combines digitization and digital
preservation of data, publications, educational materials, and
scholarship in folklore; promotes open access to these materials; and
provides an online search tool to enhance discoverability of relevant,
reliable resources for folklore studies. In its initial phase, the
partners will construct a prototype to gather feedback from the folklore
community to shape its future growth and development.
Exciting recent developments in digital preservation and publication
have positioned folklore studies to be a leader in scholarly
communication in the digital era. These are:
- Several core journals in the field (Journal of American
Folklore, Journal of Folklore Research, Folklore, Western Folklore, and
others) have been digitized in their entirety and are now available to
subscribers online from JSTOR, Project Muse, and other services.
- Folklore boasts numerous online open-access journals (available
without a subscription): Oral Tradition, Folklore Forum, Cultural
Analysis, New Directions in Folklore, Asian Ethnology, and the Indian
Folklore Research Journal, among others.
- Google Books, as part of its larger agreement with IU Bloomington,
has digitized the renowned Folklore Collection established by Stith
Thompson and maintained since his time by the IU Bloomington Libraries.
This unique collection comprises more than 57,000 books and journals.
These holdings are also being incorporated into the HathiTrust Digital Library, an open and non-commercial digital library of scholarship in which Indiana University is a leading partner.
At the same time, several persistent access and discoverability problems in the field remain:
- Many digitized books and journals are available only to subscribers
(usually those affiliated with larger colleges and universities).
- Many more digitized books are not accessible at all because of copyright restrictions.
- Other materials useful for folklore scholarship and education—white
papers, policy materials, conference presentations and discussions,
works-in-progress, syllabi and teaching materials, and other forms of
"gray literature”—have never formally been published, and so cannot be
found easily through conventional channels.
- Educational materials created by academic and public folklore
programs—such as exhibition catalogs, interpretive materials from
performance events, publications of American Folklore Society interest
groups and sections, and newsletters—are similarly not easily found
through conventional channels.
In a 2009 American Folklore Society survey of communications
practices in folklore studies, significant numbers of respondents
indicated that these categories of "fugitive” materials—along with
ethnographic source materials in archives, and theses and
dissertations—were important to their research and educational efforts
but were difficult for them to access.
Much of this gray literature and educational material is published on
the Internet, but the Internet is notoriously ephemeral and lacks
dependable preservation, making it difficult to reliably locate material
after the passage of time.
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
Open Folklore is intended to build on the new developments in digital
circulation of folklore materials to respond to these troubling access
and preservation problems. While the final shape of this project is
still in development, our general plans are as follows:
- We plan to work with rights holders to make books and journals that
have already been digitized fully and openly available online. For
example, during the preliminary phase of the Open Folklore project, the
Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review, published from 1977-2000 by the
AFS Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Section; the Folklore Historian,
published by the AFS History and Folklore Section; and Keystone Folklore
Quarterly/Keystone Folklore, published between 1956 and 1992 by the
Pennsylvania Folklore Society, have already been made available for full
and open use in the HathiTrust Digital Library.
- We plan to support the publication of new and existing journals in
folklore with an open access publishing platform. For example, Museum
Anthropology Review and New Directions in Folklore, two folklore studies
titles already published in partnership with the IU Bloomington
Libraries, will be included in Open Folklore.
- We plan to digitize educational material and gray literature in
folklore, and to provide digital preservation for other "born digital”
resources and publications. For example, the IU Bloomington Libraries
have already digitized and made freely available all of the white papers
and other public policy documents created by the Fund for Folk Culture.
- We plan to select and digitally archive websites of public and
academic folklore programs (with their permission). This effort will
guarantee access to historic Internet documents of scholarly and
disciplinary relevance for the future. We have tested this idea using
the AFS web site (www.afsnet.org).
- We plan to provide an online tool that will offer searching of all
of the above classes of material while filtering out unreliable sources.
Over the coming year, AFS and the IU Bloomington Libraries will be
consulting with academic and public programs across the field to plan
these and other activities so that we can provide the most useful
resources in the most accessible manner.
IU Bloomington Libraries Dean Brenda Johnson praised this effort,
saying: "The IU Bloomington Libraries are delighted to partner with the
American Folklore Society to create an important new tool for folklore
scholars throughout the world. This is an exciting opportunity to try
out new relationships and services in collaboration not only with
library colleagues, but also with scholars and their own scholarly
community. Open Folklore represents a tangible response to the new
scholarly communication landscape described by historian Abby Smith in
No Brief Candle, where ‘research is a global and distributed phenomenon’
in which ‘sources must be authentic, reliable, easy to find and
retrieve, and easy to use and reuse.’ In this environment, Open Folklore
provides us with the perfect opportunity to explore new tools that
support research libraries' historically rich mission - to provide
persistent access to resources that support the creation of new
knowledge - with our partners: scholars, scholarly societies, and
Jason Baird Jackson, Chair of the AFS Communications in Folklore
Working Group and the Chair of IU Bloomington's Department of Folklore
and Ethnomusicology, noted: "This is an exciting time of change in the
area of scholarly communications. Researchers and practitioners in many
fields are partnering with university libraries in new ways to make
their scholarship more accessible not only to students and other
professionals, but to diverse communities of interest. The field of
folklore studies is fortunate to have a long-term partner in the IU
Bloomington Libraries. Generations of librarians at Indiana have worked
to build a priceless research collection for our field. Now the IU
Bloomington Libraries are endeavoring with the AFS to freely share this
collection, and many other folklore resources, with the wider world.
These efforts will make scholarship in folklore studies more accessible,
and will help us to better achieve our field's shared ethical goal of
being engaged with, and responsible to, the communities that we serve
and in which we study."
AFS President Kurt Dewhurst of Michigan State University said, "The
American Folklore Society is committed to making our scholarly resources
more accessible using new technologies. The Open Folklore initiative
will foster increased access and use of the published work of
folklorists as well as scholars from related fields. We are grateful to
our partners, especially the IU Bloomington Libraries, for this
important investment in the field of folklore."
For more information on the Open Folklore initiative, please contact Timothy Lloyd from AFS, or Moira Smith from the IU Bloomington Libraries.