Open Folklore News

Moira Marsh of the Open Folklore Project team and the IU Bloomington Libraries presented on "Open Folklore Project–Collection Development, But Not as Your Father Knew It" today during the 2011 Archive-It Partners meeting in Louisville, KY. Information on the meeting, including he program is available online here: http://archiveitmeeting2011.wordpress.com/schedule/

Archive-It is a key part of the Open Folklore infrastructure through which the project preserves and makes available media rich copies of key websites in the field of folklore studies. Learn more at the OF Websites tab.

Thanks Moria for helping spread the news about Open Folklore.

In time for the 2011 American Folklore Society (AFS) meetings in Bloomington, the Open Folklore project team anticipates releasing or announcing several new enhancements to the Open Folklore portal site. Here is a preview of some of what is coming next month.

The next release will see the AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus (ET) out of its current beta testing phase and fully and officially incorporated into the Open Folklore portal. At that point, we will begin developing some how-to materials to help users incorporate the ET into their own projects. The ET will also begin to figure more prominently in the publishing and database work of various projects affiliated with Open Folklore, including IUScholarWorks and The Journal of American Folklore—the flagship journal of the American Folklore Society.

Looking ahead, the fall announcement will also call attention to a range of new folklore studies journal content that is being made available in open access form via several channels—IUScholarWorks, HathiTrust Digital Library, and Google Books. In addition, the availability of additional grey literature materials in folklore studies will be announced and additional websites in the field will be added to the Open Folklore Archive-It collection.

Some small enhancements are also being made to the OF Portal site and we anticipate releasing at least one new educational video to help the community more effectively use the resources being made available through the OF Portal and other parts of the OF project.

The upcoming AFS meetings will also provide opportunities for colleagues to learn more about not only OF but about open access and digital humanities topics in general. With AFS members converging in Bloomington—home to many parts of the OF universe—it is an especially exciting time for the project and the field. OF hopes to see you in Bloomington October 12-15, 2011.

Open Folklore Communications Lead and IU Digital Publishing Librarian Jennifer Laherty has taken a lead this summer presenting on the Open Folklore project to eager audiences at two national conferences.

In a presentation titled "Open Folklore: A Model Collaboration" that she developed with fellow OF team member Garett Montanez, Jennifer discussed the OF project with an audience at the 2011 Open Repositories Conference in Austin, Texas.

Here are excerpts from their abstract:

The Open Folklore (OF) project exemplifies inter-institutional cooperation to maximize the strengths of digital repositories and leverage the building blocks of staff, shared mission and goals, and technology to support a new model of collaboration. Kim Fortun (2011) has offered her praise for OF:  “Open Folklore has built new social relations that can undergird and protect scholarly work and education for many years to come. Most fundamentally, Open Folklore has forged new connections between scholars, a scholarly society and university librarians.” We add to this our technical partners as well.

A variety of social and technical symbiotic relationships exist within the Open Folklore project. This cross-institutional effort takes advantage of digital repositories while leveraging the building blocks of staff, shared mission and goals, and technology. This presentation will demonstrate each community’s contribution and benefits from the project. We will also illustrate how the two technical foundations central to OF’s effectiveness and success – metadata and digital repositories – operate within OF. Finally, we will discuss plans to incorporate additional pieces such as the AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus, a searchable online controlled vocabulary which would make OF Search more effective at providing access to information.

At the American Library Association meeting last month, Jennifer presented on the "Role of Humanities and Social Science Liaison Librarians in Scholarly Communication and Publishing." This presentation was part of the panel: 21st Century Scholarly Communication: Conversations for Change. The abstract for this session noted:

As the Open Access movement ramps up in the humanities and social sciences, librarians need to be aware of the initiatives that are altering traditional scholarly publishing. Open access journals, monographs, presses, and more, are changing librarians' roles and the scholarly communication landscape. This panel will discuss the progress and impact of this important reform movement from the perspective of feminist librarians and other stakeholders.

This panel was organized by the Women and Gender Studies Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries.

In her remarks, Jennifer focused on examples from the humanities and social sciences work that she does with the IUScholarWorks team at IU. Open Folklore was one of the projects that she used to explain how important scholarly society/association involvement is in these very faculty-centric issues. She expressed that faculty, though they belong to institutional departments and must comply with local promotion and tenure policies, have allegiances that are likely to be stronger to colleagues in their narrower research fields as opposed to those colleagues in their home department.

In the fall, other members of the OF project team will be speaking about the project at a number of different professional conferences. Stay tuned for more information on these presentations.

Thanks to Jennifer for her efforts spreading the word about the OF effort.

The Open Folklore Project team is pleased to announce a series of enhancements to the Open Folklore portal site (www.openfolklore.org) and a cluster of recent accomplishments for the project as a whole. Aimed at fostering open access scholarship in the field of folklore studies, Open Folklore (OF) is a collaborative project led by the American Folklore Society (AFS) and the Indiana University Bloomington (IUB) Libraries. The Utah State University (USU) Libraries, of which the USU Press and USU Special Collections are key parts, is a Strategic Partner in the OF Project. As announced in March, the OF Project has been working toward the goal of unveiling these developments on April 1, 2011, about a half a year after the OF portal site was first launched at the 2010 AFS meetings. This announcement makes these developments public.

Friends of Open Folklore
As a project, OF has now expanded to recognize a new group of partner agencies. The first "Friends of Open Folklore" are four agencies that are systemically making available a growing body of open access folklore studies scholarship and doing so in a sophisticated way that allows for the ongoing, automated inclusion of information about this rich content in the OF Search tool. These first four OF Friends are: (1) the Center for Folklore Studies (at The Ohio State University), (2) the journal Ethnobotany Research and Applications (published at the University of Hawaii), (3) the National Folklore Support Centre (Chennai, India), and (4) the World Oral Literature Project (at the University of Cambridge). Thanks go to these organization for their work advancing open access scholarship in folklore studies and neighboring fields. The OF Project looks forward to the continued expansion of the OF Friends community.

New Content for OF Search
New content discoverable in OF search now includes the full range of books and journals published by the National Folklore Support Centre (NFSC). For this first time, OF search is making available content published in non-Western alphabets. This OF first comes with the inclusion of புதிய பனுவல்: An International Journal of Tamil Studies , one of the numerous journals published through the NFSC journal portal. Also new in OF Search is all of the published and white-paper material made available by the World Oral Literature Project and all of the content published in Ethnobotany Research and Applications.

In addition to this new material being made available in an ongoing and expanding way by these OF Friends, the AFS and IUB have made substantial amounts of additional scholarly material available for the field. Included here are a large collection of American Folklore Society annual meeting programs and abstract books, a growing collection of course syllabi developed and shared by folklorists, published indexes to the Journal of American Folklore, monographs on the history of folklore studies, and an important collection of reports and white papers relating to professional development in the field. This growing corpus of published and grey-literature materials builds upon earlier collections made available by the Fund for Folk Culture and other agencies.

Additional Content for the OF Archive-IT Collection
Important website content has been added to the OF Archive-It collection. Joining the sites already being preserved in Archive-It are the content-rich websites of the Institute for Community Partnerships, the Veterans History Project, and the American Folklife Center, including the sites for many of its rich and important American Memory projects. Work toward the inclusion of additional key websites in the field is underway.

Zotero Integration
The OF Search tool has been enhanced so that users can, with a single click, include bibliographic data from OF Search results into personal Zotero research libraries. Zotero is a widely used, freely-available open source software tool for scholarly research. It allows for powerful and easy management of research sources, note-taking, tagging, and other scholarly tasks. Zotero integration is in addition to the availability of tagged, XML, and BibTex data that has been a part of OF Search since the Portal's launch. These capacities allow for the use of other common bibliographic software programs. (Folklorists interested in learning more about Zotero are encouraged to consult the introductory materials at www.zotero.org

First OF Screencast
Beginning work developing how-to materials for the use of the OF Portal site, the OF Project Team has released the first of a series of web-based screencasts. The first seven-minute video illustrates how to use the OF Search tool for discovering and accessing freely available folklore studies scholarship. The screencast is available on the OF portal site, on YouTube, and for download from the IUB Libraries. In addition, a seven-minute overview of the OF project as a whole is also available as a screencast on YouTube. Screencasts illustrating the use of other OF resources are in development.

Additional Folklore Content in HathiTrust Digital Library
Behind the scenes, the OF Project Team and the Utah State University Library are continuing work making additional folklore scholarship available via the HathiTrust Digital Library.  Thousands of folklore studies works are now searchable in HathiTrust and an ever-growing number of these are fully accessible. Among the titles now available to all via HathiTrust are many valuable works published in the Memoirs of the American Folklore Society series, a venerable collection of works published by the AFS. At IUB Libraries, extensive work aimed at making older journal runs freely available in HathiTrust is continuing.

Other Behind the Scenes Projects
In partnership with the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, work continues on enhancing the Ethnographic Thesaurus (ET) and making it available through the OF Portal Site. Also, a Drupal-based workflow tracking system designed to help the OF team manage sub-projects and tasks has been set up and is now being used.

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, and especially the OF News section of the portal site) to share new 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).

Project goals for April 1, 2011 were selected from many options as those that seemed most important to the community, those that were within our means to accomplish quickly, and those that are needed to support OF's future progress. A new set of goals for fall 2011 will be announced soon.

Yesterday, American Libraries: The Magazine of the American Library Association shared news of the Open Folklore project's winning of the The Association for Library Collections and Technical Services' (ALCTS) 2010 Outstanding Collaboration Citation. ALCTS is the national association for information providers who work in collections and technical services, such as acquisitions, cataloging, collection development, preservation and continuing resources in digital and print formats. ALCTS is a division of the American Library Association.

Find the American Libraries piece online at http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/news/ala/open-folklore-project-receives-alcts-outstanding-collaboration-award

Anthropologist and science studies scholar Kim Fortun has written an essay discussing the Open Folklore project for Anthropology News. Her piece is currently accessible (toll free) via the AAA website. Professor Fortun is the outgoing co-editor of Cultural Anthropology and a thoughtful advocate in anthropology for scholarly communication reform.

Update: With the publication of newer issues of Anthropology News, the best place to obtain Professor Fortun's article online is now via Wiley Online Library. As of March 7, 2011, the article was being made available for free (courtesy of the AAA) at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1556-3502.2011.52206.x/abstract .

The book: Folktales and Fairy Tales: Translation, Colonialism, and Cinema, edited by ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui, Noenoe Silva, Vilsoni Hereniko, and Cristina Bacchilega, is now accessible via the Open Folklore search tool. Containing the work of a large number of distinguished folklorists, the volume represents the proceedings of a conference held in Honolulu on  September 23-26, 2008. The book was published as an open access collection in ScholarSpace at University of Hawaii at Manoa. Thanks to all involved for sharing your work in an open access way.

The Open Folklore project is pleased to announce that the Utah State University Libraries are the first Open Folklore Strategic Partner.

Utah State University has been a leader in folklore scholarship, instruction, and collection building for over 40 years, offering undergraduate and graduate degrees in public and academic folklore. The USU Libraries' Special Collections and Archives is home to the American Folklore Society Papers and to the Fife Folklore Archives, one of the largest repositories of American folklore materials in the United States. The Fife Folklore Archives boasts the renowned Fife American and Mormon Collections, the flourishing Folklore Student Collection, a robust oral history program, the G. Malcolm Laws Ballad Collection and many others. Also within the USU Libraries is the USU Press, which has been publishing cutting-edge folklore studies for over thirty years. Many of these collections, including all the Press' books, are freely available to researchers in digital form, with new items and collections from the USU Libraries continually being added to Open Folklore.

Editors note: A part of the Open Folklore effort aims to durably archive content-rich websites of relevance to scholars and practitioners in the field of folklore studies. Recently a need arose to put these plans to a quick test. The Community Arts Network (CAN), a not-for-profit service organization that had built up a large and widely used website found itself needing to cease operation of its elaborate site. On August 31, 2010 Debora Kodish of the Philadelphia Folklore Project contacted the Open Folklore team at Indiana about the possibility that the project might be able to assist in the preservation of the CAN assets. Discussions and investigations quickly followed and the IU Libraries decided to pursue archiving the site. This work was complete before the time of the scheduled shut down on Labor Day, 2010. It all worked and now we can see what a website archived in the manner that we anticipate using looks and feels like. The words of appreciation that have been offered from the community arts and public folklore communities have been most appreciated and are a major source of encouragement for what we are trying to get going with Open Folklore.

To help explicate a bit further, this is a re-posting of an announcement being circulated by the Community Arts Network (CAN). It was crafted with input from the librarians at Indiana who are central to the current early-phase work on the Open Folklore project. Thanks go to everyone who has been involved in these efforts.  (See the CAN Facebook page for additional discussion.)

The Community Arts Network (CAN), Indiana University Bloomington Libraries, and the American Folklore Society are pleased to announce that the CAN Web site has been archived as part of the Open Folklore project (http://www.openfolklore.org/). Open Folklore is intended to be an online portal to open-access digital folklore content and plans to launch a prototype in October at the American Folklore Society meeting in Nashville, Tenn.

After CAN announced it would be forced to immediately shut down its Web site due to lack of funds, the IU Bloomington Libraries offered to capture the CAN Web site using 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 that was 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. Because CAN is a content-rich Web site that is of great interest to folklorists, the IU Bloomington Libraries made use of their subscription to Archive-It to preserve the site without charge.

The archived CAN is static, but is fully text searchable, though some external links and some internal scripted functions may no longer work. It is, however, a unique and permanent record of the site as it existed at the time. Users may visit the archived site at http://wayback.archive-it.org/2077/20100906194747/http://www.communityar.... The full text of the site may be searched at the Archive-It home site, http://www.archiveit.org/.

Art in the Public Interest, CAN's non-profit, will continue to seek funding to develop the CAN materials into a sophisticated archive library.

Debora Kodish, founder of the Philadelphia Folklore Project first suggested that Open Folklore might have a role to play in preserving CAN, and this suggestion was enthusiastically and swiftly adopted. IU Bloomington Libraries Dean Brenda Johnson described this sequence of events as an excellent proof of concept for Open Folklore and for the value of collaboration between a research library and the scholarly community it serves. “This is a sterling example of why digital preservation efforts are so important. Without the active collaboration of the folklore community, and without IUB Libraries participation in Archive-It, a unique and valuable online resource would have vanished.”