Date: Aug. 13, 2014
Time: 2 p.m. & 3 p.m.
Maximum Number of Participants: 20 per tour
Pre-registration Required.
Contact Information:
Nicole Saylor
Head of the Archive, American Folklife Center
Library of Congress
nsay@loc.gov | (202) 707-9343
To Register Contact: Andrew Cassidy-Amstutz | acas@loc.gov
Description of Tour: The 20th century has been called the age of documentation, and folklorists and other ethnographers then and now have taken advantage of each succeeding technology, from Thomas Edison's wax-cylinder recording machine, invented in 1877, to the latest digital audio equipment to record the voices and music of many regional, ethnic, and cultural groups worldwide. Much of this documentation has been assembled and preserved in the American Folklife Center Archive.
Today, the Archive is one of the largest archives of ethnographic materials from the United States and around the world, encompassing millions of items of ethnographic and historical documentation recorded from the nineteenth century to the present. Included are nearly 400,000 hours of recordings, more than a half-million photographs, several million pages of manuscript materials and artifacts ranging from one of Burl Ives’ guitars to the original Yellow Ribbon. These collections, actively growing to reflect traditional culture of the new millennium, provide a record of the folklife, cultural expressions, traditional arts, and oral histories of Americans and of people throughout the world.
The tour will introduce visitors to the Archive’s collections and discuss some of the particular challenges and opportunities inherent in curating multi-format collections.
Location:
Library of Congress
Thomas Jefferson Building, LJ-G49
101 Independence Ave, SE
Washington, DC 20540
Parking Available.
Closest Metro and/or Metrobus: Capitol South (Blue/Orange/Silver Metro lines)
Annual Meeting referenced:
