In the 1980s, American Folklife Center folklife specialists made several visits to the annual Omaha pow-wow during which they returned copies of historic wax cylinder recordings to members of the Omaha tribe in keeping with a goal of the Federal Cylinder Project. For the 1983 pow-wow recordings, a decision was made to include only the songs that were sung by Omaha drums--the Host Drum and the Tai Piah Singers. Photographs of the visiting drums--the Honey Creek Singers and the San Juan Pueblo--are included.

The Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project was conducted by the American Folklife Center in cooperation with the National Park Service. Ten folklorists from the American Folklife Center conducted fieldwork in August and September 1978, and collected related materials from 1977 to 1981. The materials were collected for use in designing and improving National Park Service interpretive programs along the Blue Ridge Parkway. Dance traditions of the British Isle diasporic communities were documented.

The Montana Folklife Survey was conducted in the summer of 1979 by the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress, in cooperation with the Montana Arts Council. The survey was a field research project to document traditional folklife in Montana. Dance traditions from the Crow tribe and the Irish, and Greek diasporic communities were documented.

Between the mid-1970s and the late-1990s, the American Folklife Center coordinated a series of field surveys across the United States. Many of these projects occurred with the help of partner organizations at the federal or state level, and were intended to generate significant bodies of cultural documentation that could serve multiple purposes. Fieldworkers included AFC staff as well as specialists in various fields that the AFC contracted for the duration of a given project. This interactive Story Map guides visitors across the country from east to west, visiting each online field survey collection.