Nicole Saylor: Archiving Folk Culture in the Digital Age

The American Folklife Center Archives, established in the Library of Congress in 1928, is home to millions of items of ethnographic and historical documentation, including folk songs, stories, and other creative expressions of people from diverse communities. Providing access at digital scale to a myriad of audiovisual formats in the context of complicated cultural and copyright issues inherent in documentation of expressive culture is a significant challenge. So is ensuring that the archives continues to collect and provide access to contemporary folk culture documentation in ways that meet the changing demands of scholars. Toward that end, AFC has recently piloted a distributed model of field collecting that relies on documentarians across the country to provide new cultural documentation to the archives via a web-based tool. AFC also hopes to embark on a “vernacular web” archiving project that enlists digital culture scholars to help shape and guide collection priorities. This Digital Dialogue will focus on archival collecting efforts that increasingly rely on curatorial partnerships with scholars.