The American Folklife Center at the
Library will house the recorded archives of StoryCorps, a groundbreaking
oral history project that is designed to instruct and inspire Americans
to record one another's stories in sound. The project is the brainchild
of MacArthur Fellow Dave Isay and his award-winning nonprofit documentary
company, Sound Portraits Productions. It has the potential to become one
of the largest documentary oral history projects ever donated to the Library
of Congress, and it will be one of the first collections created in digital
form to come to the American Folklife Center.
The American Folklife Center was created by Congress in 1976 and placed
at the Library of Congress to "preserve and present American folklife"
through programs of research, documentation, archival preservation, reference
service, live performance, exhibition, public programs and training. The
center incorporates the Archive of Folk Culture, which was established
in the Library in 1928 and is now one of the largest collections of ethnographic
material from the United States and around the world.
The Archive of Folk Culture will be the repository for the StoryCorps
collection. The Library's folklife specialists will be responsible for
ensuring that the collection is preserved in digital form, appropriately
indexed and cataloged and then made accessible to the public at the American
Folklife Center and on the Library's Web
site. In this way, the StoryCorps collection will be available to
future generations of researchers and family descendants; some of the
stories are already available at the StoryCorps
Web site.
