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Open Folklore Partners

Founding Partners

Open Folklore is a collaboration of the American Folklore Society, the Indiana University Libraries, and the IU Digital Library Program. At the moment, a project team from these organizations are responsible for developing and supporting the site (see About Us). We hope that this collaboration will extend far beyond these three organizations, and plan to evolve our governance and decision-making structures as Open Folklore grows.

Strategic Partners
Open Folklore strategic partners are organizations with content that is critically important to folklore scholarship, whose values and goals are closely aligned with Open Folklore’s, and who are committed to devoting resources to achieve shared goals. Open Folklore will highlight these organizations' content, acknowledge their importance to the success of the project, and actively pursue new forms of collaboration with them.

The Open Folklore Project Team has invited the Utah State University Libraries to join us as our first Strategic Partner. Utah State University has been a leader in folklore scholarship, instruction, and collection building for over 40 years, offering an undergraduate minor and graduate degrees specializing in public and academic folklore. The USU Libraries’ Special Collections and Archives is home to the American Folklore Society Papers and the Fife Folklore Archives, one of the largest repositories of American folklore 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, 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 records for new items and collections from the USU Libraries continually added to Open Folklore.

Friends of Open Folklore
Central to the success of Open Folklore are those publishers, repositories, and organizations that are actively increasing the range of openly available scholarly resources in folklore studies. A large number of organizations and rights holders have generously contributed to the building of the Open Folklore portal and cultivating an open access scholarly communications system in folklore studies; so many, in fact, that we cannot list them all here. The full range of OF content contributors can be found by consulting the Havested Content page. The Journals, Books, Websites, and Grey Literature pages also identify organizations producing open access folklore scholarship more generally.

Some organizations, however, have taken special and conscious steps to partner with the Open Folklore Project, and we would like to explicitly recognize them as Friends of Open Folklore. These organizations’ goals and values align with the project, they are actively pursuing partnerships with the Open Folklore project, and in making their scholarly materials accessible, have made the conscious choice to use interoperable systems that facilitate their inclusion in the Open Folklore search tool. Friends of Open Folklore are:

Journals, repositories, and projects wishing to collaborate formally with the Open Folklore project are directed to the About Us and the Contact pages.