The American Folklife Center collections consist of ethnographic documentation -- culturally-descriptive materials regarding particular groups and individuals, locations, events, and so on. The collections are frequently multiformat, encompassing audiovisual resources as well as written and photographic materials. The documentation in the Center's archive is the intellectual property of the communities of origin. As such, they must be consulted for matters of access and use. Unless there are restrictions limiting access at the request of communities of origin, people coming to the Folklife Reading Room will be able to hear and view all of the available documentation.

Indigenous collections vary in size, from a single wax cylinder lasting no more than two minutes to a collection of hundreds of hours of storytelling. While many collections come from single communities or closely-associated ones, others are compilations of recordings from ten or more disparate locations visited during the course of a recordist's travels. Coverage of geographical areas is variable and somewhat reflects the19th and 20th history of documentary efforts. By the time it was possible to record sound, many Indigenous communities in the East had been displaced or their traditional ways suppressed. The ethnographers of the time therefore frequently travelled instead to southwestern Pueblos, the Pacific Northwest, or to communities in Oklahoma and the Northern Plains. Far less documentation was created in communities east of the Mississippi River within the United States, and not every Indigenous community is represented the Center's collections. Given that tribal territories overlap national boundaries, collections here also include documentation from Canadian, Mexican, and other Central American communities.

The earliest recordings here are those of Passamaquoddy men in March 1890, recorded in Calais, Maine. Many of the earlier non-tribal documentarians were particularly interested in ceremonies believed to be older traditions. Since most of the ceremonial leaders they encountered were men, the bulk of their recordings consist of male voices and male repertory. The songs of women and children as well as social dance songs are rarely found in the ethnographic collections until the 1940s when, for example, Willard Rhodes was making his summer trips to various communities and WNAD in Norman, Oklahoma, was broadcasting the "Indians for Indians" radio programs.

This page features information on various types of AFC collections containing relevant documentation, from those received from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous documentarians to field surveys conducted by the Center and to interviews in the Veterans History Project collection. Additional documentation is often found within large collections from organizations that host events as well as within collections representing a scholar's overall career.