Working in Paterson is based on the American Folklife Center's Working in Paterson Folklife Project (AFC 1995/028), a four-month study of occupational culture in Paterson, New Jersey, the nation's first planned industrial center, in 1994. The study was part of the federal Urban History Initiative (UHI) program sponsored in Congress by U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg and administered by the National Park Service Mid-Atlantic Regional Office. The study focused on the ways in which community life and values are shaped by work and how the theme of work intersects with other themes, namely family, ethnicity, gender, neighborhood, and change over time.

Folklife specialist David Taylor from the American Folklife Center directed the study. He and members of his research team interviewed active and retired workers in the textile and other important local industries, photographed workers and work-related events, and documented other aspects of Paterson's occupational heritage. In addition to Taylor, the research team consisted of documentary photographer Martha Cooper and folklorists Tom Carroll (a native of Paterson), Susan Levitas, Timothy Lloyd, and Robert McCarl.

The themes that emerge from the field project are continuity and change of manufacturing over time; the manufacturing process; the industrial landscape; trade unionism; work and ethnicity; work in the African-American community; the ethnography of a single work place (Watson Machine International); a distinctive food tradition; a farmers' market; businesses run by Italian, Hispanic, and Arab Americans; and work, family, and home.

The resulting collection consists of approximately 97 hours of recorded interviews (87 cassette and digital audio tapes) with people in their homes and places of work; 6,192 still photographs (3,420 35-mm color slides and 2,772 black-and-white images) documenting informants, work processes, work sites, industrial and commercial architecture, and other visible elements of occupational culture, including historic photos, documents, and memorabilia; and 1,004 manuscript pages of documentation, including 387 pages of audiotape catalogs, 303 pages of photograph catalogs, and 314 pages of fieldnotes, in addition to administrative correspondence, maps, publications, and ephemera. These materials constitute the primary archival collection, which is available to researchers in the American Folklife Center's Folklife Reading Room at the Library of Congress. A secondary or duplicate archival collection was created by the Center at the request of the National Park Service. With the notable exception of one-of-a-kind items, such as black-and-white negatives and original color slides, this collection duplicates the primary collection. The Center will present the duplicate collection to the National Park Service which will, in turn, present it to a public educational facility (such as a museum or library) in Paterson, where it will be accessible to residents of the city and others who are interested in Paterson's occupational heritage.

This online presentation provides access to digital audio files for approximately 500 interview excerpts, 3,800 photographs, four articles about the field research project previously printed in Folklife Center News, and edited versions of two reports from Working in Paterson: A Survey of Occupational Culture in Paterson, New Jersey, with Recommendations for Public Programming. A Report Submitted to the Chesapeake System Support Office, National Park Service. Relevant information from the audio and photograph catalogs form the basis of the bibliographic records for individual items.