The American Folklife Center is a research center at the Library of Congress dedicated to ethnographic documentation and public programming, and was established through an act of Congress: the 1976 American Folklife Preservation Act (Public Law 94-201). The archive of the American Folklife Center holds collections documenting expressive culture practices in the United States and around the world. This guide provides research tools and strategies for accessing those collections.

Archival collections at the Library of Congress have three enterprise-wide access systems, which are described in this guide: digital collections, finding aids, and the online catalog. There are also local tools, unique to our reading room. The historic cross-collection guides provide detailed item-level information, and will eventually be integrated into LibGuides. Other resources in the American Folklife Center Reading Room include hardcopy files related to collections and subjects, as well as an historic card catalog. This constellation of access systems is held together through controlled vocabularies, specifically subject headings and thesauri.