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Folklife

Collection Policy Statement Index

I. Scope

This statement refers to all materials that pertain to the subject of folklife, which is defined as the traditional expressive culture shared within various groups: familial, ethnic, occupational, religious, regional; expressive culture includes a wide range of creative and symbolic forms such as custom, belief, technical skill, language, literature, art, architecture, music, play, dance, drama, ritual, pageantry, handicraft; these expressions are mainly learned orally, by imitation, or in performance, and are generally maintained without benefit of formal instruction or institutional direction.

The materials covered by this statement represent many formats, including: books, manuscripts, audio recordings, video recordings, photographs, photographic negatives and contact sheets, motion pictures, scholarly journals, avocational bulletins and newsletters, microfilms, machine-readable materials, and ephemera. These items include published as well as unpublished, and commercial as well as non-commercial materials.

The core publications covered by this statement are found in Classes GN, GR, M, ML, NK, PN, PQ, PR, PS and PT. Ancillary to these materials are certain holdings of the Manuscript Division; the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division; the Music Division; the Prints and Photographs Divisions; and all area-studies divisions.

This statement deals with folklife as a subject rather than as a format. Therefore, it affects the concerns of virtually all divisions with custodial responsibilities. Accordingly, when a potential acquisition in the subject area of folklife affects more than one division with custodial responsibilities, the appropriate staff of those divisions are to consult with one another to determine the best course of procedure for the Library. More than one division is said to be affected when:

materials from the potential acquisition could be assigned to more than one custodial division, and/or
the appropriate recommending officer is not a staff member of the division(s) receiving the material.

II. General Policy

The Library of Congress places primary emphasis on American folklife and collects comprehensively in this area. However, in recognition of the fact the United States is "a nation of immigrants" the Library collects material about the folklife of other countries and regions in order to illuminate dynamic connections between American folklife and the folklife of other lands over time (the connections between Irish-American folklife and Irish folklife, for example). Specifically, the Library collects significant books, scholarly journals, audio and video recordings, and ethnographic field collections (to give a few examples) concerning the folklife that characterizes other countries and regions. Materials rendered in English and all other languages are collected.

Formats
1. Books and Periodicals
  The Library will endeavor to acquire for its permanent collection monographs and serials that contribute to research about the history, theories, genres, styles, performance of folklife in all its variety within the following guidelines:
2. Paper-Based Records
  The Library will collect the papers of important scholars and documenters of folklife in context, including those of folklorists, ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and other ethnographers. The Library will also collect the papers of folk artists (including traditional singers, instrumental musicians, storytellers, and craftspeople) and folk-revival performers and songwriters of national and international significance. Materials of particular significance are the ethnographic fieldnotes of cultural specialists, along with associated catalogs for audiotapes, videotapes, motion pictures, and photographs made in the field. Also of major interest are manuscripts of the words and music of prominent folk-revival singer-songwriters.a. The Library will maintain selected, research-level collections of the institutional papers of folklife organizations and granting institutions of national significance (e.g., the Folk Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Folk Festival papers of the National Council for the Traditional Arts).
3. Sound and Moving-Image Recordings
  The Library will acquire sound and moving image recordings in any format that document folklife in context; explicate the history, forms, functions, and/or styles of folklife; and depict the lives of folk artists and folklife scholars of national or international significance. Works of particular importance are unpublished ethnographic audio and video recordings made in the field by cultural specialists. (Commercial sound recordings and archival copies of moving image recordings will reside in M/B/R/S.)
4. Photographs
  The Library will acquire original color and black-and-white photographs in any format depicting such things as folklife in context, material culture, and folk artists and folklife scholars of national or international significance. In general, images recorded as documentary photography will be of highest interest. (These materials will reside in the Archive of Folk Culture and also in the Prints & Photographs Division.)
5. Ephemera
  The Library will maintain research-level collections of ephemera concerning American folklife, including such items as posters advertising performances of folk music, folk festival programs, and newspaper articles about aspects of folklife in the United States.
6. Multi-Format Ethnographic Collections
  The Library will collect multi-format ethnographic collections made in the field by folklorists, ethnomusicologists, anthropologists and other cultural specialists of national or international significance. Such collections will typically include interrelated manuscripts, audiotapes, videotapes or motion pictures, photographs, machine-readable materials, catalogs, lists, and printed ephemera. These documentary collections will include, but will not be limited to, those generated by field-research projects sponsored by the American Folklife Center.

III. Archive of Folk Culture

The American Folklife Center's Archive of Folk Culture maintains the Library's largest and most significant collection of folklife materials. It is the country's national archive of traditional life and one of the oldest and largest of such repositories in the world. There are over two- million items in the collection representing all major formats.

Characteristics of the collection
1. American folk music
  World's best collection of recordings and associated paper-based records; pre-1950 collections are especially strong; includes performances of songs and instrumental music by little-known grassroots musicians as well as performances by world-famous musicians such as Elizabeth Cotten, Woody Guthrie, Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter, Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton, and Pete Seeger; includes collections of the most important folklife fieldworkers of the early twentieth century, such as John and Alan Lomax, Herbert Halpert, Eloise Linscott, Zora Neale Hurston, and Vance Randolph; extensive materials concerning the post-war American folksong revival.
2. Native American Music and Narrative
  World's largest collection of field recordings, including first ethnographic field recording made anywhere in the world (Jesse Walter Fewkes, in 1890).
3. African American Folk Music and Narrative
  Monumental recordings of African-American blues music, stories, street cries, children's games, etc., made by John and Alan Lomax, Zora Neale Hurston, and others.
4. American English Regional Dialect
  Nation's best collection of recordings of American regional dialect; includes the American Dialect Society Collection of stories, oral histories, and traditional practices recorded in New England in the 1930s.
5. W.P.A. Folklore Projects
  Documentation of regional and ethnic music, narratives, and oral histories under the auspices of the Joint Committee on Folk Arts., the Federal Writers' Project, the California Folk Music Project, and other initiatives of the Works Progress Administration; includes important sound recordings of narratives of ex-slaves.
6. Traditional stories, oral histories, and other narrative material from the United States
  Many collections contain material of this kind; though less well known than the collections of traditional music, the collections of narrative material constitute one of the Archive's great treasures. Includes the Storytelling Foundation International Collection, which documents over thirty years of the National Storytelling Festival.
7. Documentation of Community Life in the United States
  Multi-format documentation of a wide variety of local traditions ranging from foodways to rituals to beliefs to occupational practices; of particular significance are the collections generated by AFC's multi-disciplinary field research projects conducted throughout the country (1977-present), and the grassroots Local Legacies Project
8. Music of Ukranian Minstrels
  Copies of 400 one-of-a-kind wax-cylinder field recordings of Ukrainian blind minstrels made between 1904 and 1939; recordings feature epics (dumy) concerning such topics as village life and the exploits of the Cossacks.
9. International Folklore collected by American researchers
  Extensive field recordings of traditional music and other expressive genres made throughout the world by collectors such as Laura Boulton (Asia and Africa), Paul Bowles (Morocco), Vida Chenoweth (Africa, Papua New Guinea, Pacific islands), Harold Conklin (the Philippines), Bruce and Sheridan Fahnestock (South Pacific islands), Joel Halpern (Laos, former Yugoslavia), and Henrietta Yurchenco (Central America, Mexico, Morocco, Spain).
10. British and American Folk Music and Drama
  Especially notable is the extensive James Madison Carpenter Collection, one of the most important collections of British ballads, sea shanties, dance tunes, and mummer's plays; it includes the nation's largest collection of English ritual-drama texts.
11. Brazilian Chapbooks
  The Archive's Literatura de Cordel Collection is the world's largest collection of this form of printed ephemera; over 4,000 chapbooks (1950-present) contain folk poetry that expresses grassroots perceptions of historical and political events, religious concepts, kinship, and other topics.
12. Visual Documentation of traditional culture
  450,000 color and black-and-white images, plus motion pictures and videotapes, documenting a wide variety of cultural traditions in context throughout the United States and abroad.
13. Occupational Lore
  Extensive documentation of the occupational traditions of barbers, boat builders, cooks, cowboys, farmers, factory workers, fishers, loggers, miners, musicians, textile workers, railroad workers, ranchers, seamstresses, soldiers, trappers, winemakers, among many others.
14. War Veterans Oral Histories
  Extensive collection of audio-taped and video-taped first-person accounts of the experiences of American war veterans. This documentation flows from the Veterans History Project, mandated by Congress in 2000. It is anticipated that, when completed, this collection will be the largest of its kind in the nation.
15. Printed Ephemera
  The Archive's collection of folk festival posters and programs, folk club newsletters, and the like is one of the largest in the country.

IV. Collections of other major research institutions

The Library's collections concerning folklife are undoubtedly the largest, richest and most comprehensive in the United States; the field collections in the Archive of Folk Culture are especially unique and valuable. However, many other institutions in the nation also possess collections that make them important research centers with respect to folklife. The most prominent, with collections generally similar to those of the Library's, include:

Indiana University, with its Archive of Traditional Music as well as its special collection of folklore books and journals in the main library; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with its archival Southern Folklife Collection; Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, both with significant rare-book holdings concerning folklore studies; the University of Mississippi, with the archival collections of its Center for the Study of Southern Culture and the Kenneth S. Goldstein book collection; and the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, with its Ralph Rinzler Archive, which mainly comprises documentation of the Festival of American Folklife and other initiatives of the Center, and the holdings of Folkways Records.

V. Collecting Priorities: Archive of Folk Culture

Original, unpublished field documentation (e.g., audio recordings, motion pictures, photographs, fieldnotes) of bearers of traditional culture, in the United States and abroad, who are of national or international significance, and field documentation of cultural traditions in context, also in the United States and abroad, that are of national or international significance. Such materials include:
1. Published and unpublished materials concerning the regional folklife of the United States.
2. Published and unpublished materials concerning the folklife of ethnic groups in the United States.
3. Published and unpublished materials concerning calendar customs practiced in the United States and abroad (e.g., New Year's, Easter, Passover, Juneteenth, Halloween, Ramadan, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah).
4. Published and unpublished materials concerning life-cycle traditions practiced in the United States and abroad (e.g., anniversaries, bar mitzvahs, birthdays, funerals, retirement parties, and weddings).
Original, unpublished manuscripts and other paper-based records of folklorists and other cultural specialists, as well as folk artists and folk-revival musicians, of national or international significance, that relate to their careers.
Rare commercial recordings of traditional music, including published recordings and unpublished test pressings. Of particular interest are recordings made in the United States during the early decades of the recording industry, ca.. 1900-1940, as well as later releases of traditional music on small regional, "ethnic" and other special-interest labels. (When acquired, such materials will generally come into the custody of M/B/R/S.)
Original, unpublished sound recordings, motion pictures, photographs, and other documentation of folk festivals and other public programs of national or international significance that feature traditional musicians, dancers, storytellers and other performers. (When acquired, motion pictures will generally come into the custody of M/B/R/S.)
Original, unpublished audio and video recordings of American war veterans. (See III. A. 14, above.)

VI. Exclusions

The Library does not collect three-dimensional artifacts (e.g., baskets, quilts, costumes) that are products of folk cultural practice. Persons offering to donate or sell such items may be referred to the Smithsonian Institution or regional, state, or local museums or other appropriate repositories.
Materials that are not considered to be of national or international significance are generally not considered to be of high priority. Persons offering collections that do not meet this criterion may be advised to contact local, state, or regional archives, museums or other appropriate repositories.

January 2002