The American Folklife Center has provided information about and links to additional resources that may be helpful to researchers interested in the Indigenous resources in both the Center and the larger Library of Congress. Included on this page are links to select articles and podcast episodes of the Center's blog and podcast series, both titled Folklife Today, as well as references to materials available onsite in the Folklife Reading Room.
This video is of an orientation for researchers participating in one of the National Breath of Life Institutes for Indigenous Languages. Specialists from different Library divisions provide information on using Library of Congress collections.
Story Maps at the Library of Congress are immersive web presentations that tell the incredible stories of the Library’s collections through narrative, multimedia, and interactive maps. The American Folklife Center publishes Story Maps that provide curated access to our online collections.
Story Map: Living Nations, Living WordsThe earliest ethnographic audio recordings were made using wax cylinders. The early four-inch cylinders typically held no more than two or three minutes of recordings, while slightly later six-inch ones often held six or more minutes of sound. The cylinders themselves are fragile. From 1977-1987, the American Folklife Center undertook a large-scale project to identify wax cylinder collections in its own archive as well as in universities, federal institutions, and private collections. Once the fragile audio was preserved on new media and the collections were cataloged, the Federal Cylinder Project disseminated cassette copies of the recordings to Indigenous communities with connections to the songs. Along with new preservation copies of the wax cylinders were the comprehensive catalogs of the recordings created by project staff to aid in future research. While catalog volumes planned for the Center's Plains, Navajo, and Pueblo cylinder recordings were never published, information on those collections is available in the Folklife Reading Room. The volumes that were published are now available online on the HathiTrust website. External
The Federal cylinder project: a guide to field cylinder collections in federal agenciesThe Veterans History Project has created a research guide for Navajo Code Talker interview collections. The guide features a selection of oral histories available online that document the experiences of these veterans, along with additional related resources and suggestions for further research.
Folklife Today is the American Folklife Center's blog (the successor to the previous serial publication, Folklife Center News), featuring brief articles on folklife topics, highlighting the unparalleled collections of the Library of Congress, especially the American Folklife Center and the Veterans History Project. These collections include the songs, stories, traditional arts, culture expressions and oral histories of people from all over the country and the world. Subject searches can be done on the blog's Home page. Suggested posts are as follows:
For more Folklife Today blog articles on Indigenous topics and collections, please use the subject searches.
The Folklife Today podcast tells stories about the cultural traditions and folklore of diverse communities, combining brand-new interviews and narration with songs, stories, music, and oral history from the collections of the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center.
In addition to collections that are searchable through the Library-wide catalog, the Center has other collection materials which may be currently in process, or that exist as analog resources only available onsite. These include subject files for many tribal communities as well as folders on specific song or dance genres, or tribal-related issues. Researchers interested in viewing these items should contact the AFC Reading Room.
Among these analog resources are articles on Indigenous collections and/or topics written by AFC staff and contractors that were published in Folklife Center News, the predecessor publication to the Folklife Today blog. Sample article titles include:
