Folklore Archive Books and Journals for Donations

Migrating the Folklore Archive to Digital Format Enroute to the Penn Museum and SCETI

Over the past five years, the Center for Folklore and Ethnography and the Graduate Program in Folklore and Folklife have made steady progress toward online accessibility for the holdings of the fifty-year old Folklore Archive. The Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image has expressed interest in hosting the Penn Folklore Archive Online, once the digitizing is completed. Online accessibility will not only enhance opportunities for scholarly research, but will make cultural documents available to community stakeholders. The Folklore Archive represents half a century of engaged public intellectual scholarship, engaging faculty and students from the University of Pennsylania with communities throughout the greater Delaware Valley, the mid-Atlantic region, and the Atlantic Maritimes, from Newfoundland to the West Indies.

Since 2001 with support from the Center for Folklore and Ethnography’s sponsored research projects, most of the ethnographic collections added to the folklore archive were “born digital.” In addition, the School of Arts and Sciences has supported the digitizing of thousands of pages of manuscript as well as the creation of electronic databases that will make the Archive’s manuscript collections much more accessible than they have been.

With additional support from SAS and the Roger D. Abrahams fund, along with a successful “books for donations” campaign in the spring of 2007, we have migrated some of the endangered moving picture and recorded sound collections to digital format, including all of the MacEdward Leach Jamaican recordings, and a number of the moving images from the Birdwhistell and Colloquia collections. To continue digitizing the endangered sound recordings, however, we ask for your donations to the Roger D. Abrahams fund, which remains a crucial resource for the Graduate Program in Folklore and Folklife.

Incentives for Donations

We have decided to distribute the approximately 850 books, and the approximately equivalent number of journals, as incentives to raise money to migrate the endangered sound recordings to digital format. The bulk of the endangered recordings comprise close to 300 reels from the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s, including the Caribbean recordings of Jacob D. Elder and Roger D. Abrahams, the Appalachian recordings of MacEdward Leach and Samuel Bayard, and a large number of Newfoundland recordings, most of them made by Kenneth S. Goldstein, with Wilf Wareham and others.

To make your donation and select your books

• Write a check payable to Trustees, University of Pennsylvania, indicating in the subject line that it goes to the RDA fund for folklore and ethnography;
• Select your books, following these instructions:

1. Choose three times the number of books for which you are eligible, ranking your selections by placing a “1,” a “2,” or a “3” in the column provided on the list of books. (Because we will distribute the books on a first-come-first-served basis, we may not be able to give you all of your first selections).
2. Indicate your ranked selections directly onto the spreadsheet, or onto a list you create yourself;
3. Send an e-mail advising us of the amount of your donation and attaching the list of your ranked selections to send your e-mail to Mary Hufford mhufford@sas.upenn.edu

 

• Mail your check to:

Susan Cerrone, Business Manager
Room 301 Cohen Hall
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304

As soon as your check arrives, we will send you the books via media mail, and notify you with tracking information

Books and Journals for Donation

Books
A list of available books is posted here, both in PDF (by author or call number) and Excel spreadsheet formats, to facilitate browsing by author or by call number, and to allow you to indicate which books or journals you would like to receive in the appropriate column.

A formula books-for-donations-and-shipping-and-handling costs is posted here.

The books will be dispersed on a first-come, first-served basis. We will honor as many of your first choices as possible, before proceeding to the next tiers.

We will update the list of books periodically, notifying the listservs when we do so.

Print Journals
A list of print journals with instructions for donations and selections will be posted shortly. Please check back within the next week.

We would prefer not to split up journals for which we have complete sets up to a given date, such as the Journal of American Folklore, Western Folklore, and the Journal of Folklore Research. We ask for a donation that would at least cover bulk shipping and handling, and will gladly confer with would-be donors to work out the details.

Please note that AFS Memoirs and Folklore Fellows Communications count as books, not journals.

Other Holdings and Ways to Donate

Artifacts
Over the past fifty years, a number of artifacts have been deposited with the archive. These are relatively undocumented, and if you deposited any of them here, we need to know who you are, and whether you would like the artifacts to go to the museum, whether you would consider donating them as fundraising incentives, or whether you would like them returned. Photographs of these artifacts can be viewed here.

Bound Dissertations
If you donated your dissertation to the Folklore Archive before admissions to the program were suspended in 2004, it was handsomely bound and prominently displayed for five years. A list of the authors of these dissertations will appear here shortly. If you would like to own this dissertation, we will be happy to send it to you for a $30 donation to recover costs of binding and to cover shipping and handling. If you have a multi-volume dissertation, we ask for a larger donation; please contact us to work out the details. Please send a check to Susan Cerrone (address above), and an e-mail to Mary Hufford at mhufford@sas.upenn.edu.

Incentives for Donating Time
If you live within commuting distance and would like to donate your time to help with some of the remaining scanning, database creation, and labelling tasks, we would be glad to talk with you about possible incentives, including some documentary equipment, for the donation of time. To donate your time, please contact Mary Hufford at mhufford@sas.upenn.edu or 215-704-9584.

Seeking to Contact Depositors
A number of collections and artifacts in the archive were given as donations; others as deposits. University policy is to accept only what is donated, not what is deposited. We have made efforts to contact known depositors and donors and their families, but not all depositors and donors are accounted for in our records. If you are a depositor or a donor, we need to hear from you, to learn whether you wish your gift or deposit to accompany the Folklore Archive to the Penn Museum, or whether you would prefer to retrieve it, or perhaps to donate it (if it is an artifact) as a fundraising incentive. If you have questions, please contact Mary Hufford: mhufford@sas.upenn.edu.

What You Can Do to Help

If you have an interest in what becomes of the materials in the University of Pennsylvania’s Folklore Archive, we need to hear from you. We are working to develop a comprehensive understanding of the recordings themselves, the conditions under which they were made, the people who collaborated on them, and the value of these materials to communities in the present. This will help us to set priorities in getting the work done, obtain permission to place materials online, to determine what restrictions should be placed on the use of the materials deposited here, and to identify the extent of support we have for this project. You can express your support by:

• Writing to us to let us know which materials are most important to you and why;
• Making a financial contribution to the Roger D. Abrahams fund for folklore and ethnography, indicating your interest in the archival digitization project; and/or
• Volunteering to help us with the digitizing of manuscripts

We have begun migrating information about the materials from thousands of hand-written “master-cards” into electronic databases, and have begun creating pdfs of related manuscript materials. Some of these databases in progress are posted to this website. Please look through these inventories, and send us your questions, concerns, and comments. We plan to update the lists every few months.

Digitizing the sound recordings will require major funding. There are close to five hundred sound recordings and moving images that need to be preserved and digitized. We have engaged Safe Sound Archive in appraising the condition of the tapes and we are in the process of applying for grant money to support the migration of sound recordings and moving images to digital format. Your contributions and letters of support will help us to identify the constituencies for whom this archive is most significant.

Again, if you are one of the people whose names appear in the posted documents, or if you know anyone who participated in the making of the recordings and manuscripts, if you yourself are engaged with the contributing communities and localities, have information to share about the collections, or questions about holdings that you think we may have but are not listed, in short, if you have an interest in what becomes of the materials in the University of Pennsylvania’s Folklore Archive, please send us your contact information along with a description of the holdings in which you are interested and the nature of your interest, and we will keep you informed as the project to migrate the archive moves forward.

Migrating the Archive to Digital Format

Holdings and Collections

Online Database of Archive Holdings (In Progress)

Hours and Rules for Use

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