What Folklorists Do

Professional Possibilities in Folklore Studies

Timothy Lloyd

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780253058409
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Folklore & Mythology
• Index: Social Sciences

What can you do with a folklore degree? Over six dozen folklorists, writing from their own experiences, show us.

What Folklorists Do examines a wide range of professionals—both within and outside the academy, at the beginning of their careers or holding senior management positions—to demonstrate the many ways that folklore studies can shape and support the activities of those trained in it. As one of the oldest academic professions in the United States and grounded in ethnographic fieldwork, folklore has always been concerned with public service and engagement beyond the academy. Consequently, as this book demonstrates, the career applications of a training in folklore are many—advocating for local and national causes; shaping public policy; directing and serving in museums; working as journalists, publishers, textbook writers, or journal editors; directing national government programs or being involved in historic preservation; teaching undergraduate and graduate students; producing music festivals; pursuing a career in politics; or even becoming a stand-up comedian.

A comprehensive guide to the range of good work carried out by today's folklorists, What Folklorists Do is essential reading for folklore students and professionals and those in positions to hire them.

Audio book narrated by Walter Brown. Produced by Speechki in 2021.

CHAPTER 3

Communicating and Curating

ARCHIVING FOR PRESERVATION, ACCESS, AND UNDERSTANDING: TERRI M. JORDAN

Terri M. Jordan earned her MA in folklore and her MLS at Indiana University and is Fife Folklore Archives Curator at Utah State University.

When I arrived at Indiana University as a folklore graduate student, I didn’t know what I wanted to do in the discipline. I only knew that I wanted to work with the stories people tell about the world around them and learn about the ways these stories connect with a broad spectrum of audiences. Although I didn’t realize it at first, working in folklore archives is a natural way to accomplish this goal: at the core of folklore archiving, stories in various iterations—narrative, song, dance, and many others—are captured on archival media and preserved so they may be connected to individuals and communities of all stripes.

One and a half years into my folklore degree, I took my first steps down the path to archives work when I concurrently enrolled in Indiana University’s Library and Information Science graduate program. As a lifelong lover of books and other texts and a witness to the role that oral histories, story collections, and other primary resources play in the transmission of folklore, I believed the discipline of library science would enable me to combine a number of my personal and professional interests.

The same semester I began coursework in the library science program, I began work at Indiana University’s Mathers Museum of World Cultures under the supervision of curator Dr. Ellen Sieber. Because of my library interests, one of the major collections I was given to work with was a subset of the Wanamaker Collection of American Indian Photographs containing photographic materials related to Native American World War I veterans. While photographic prints were part of these materials, most of the items I handled were the papers of the photographer Joseph Dixon. Dixon had not only photographed veterans but also had many of them complete questionnaires on their tribal and military affiliations, and he compiled histories and conversations he collected from them less formally.

In cataloging this collection, I came to understand how the intersection of different types of archival materials can tell a more well-rounded story. The soldiers in the photographs were of the most visual interest, but it was the information contained in the documents that gave researchers a more complete picture of these veterans’ experiences and made the materials easier to locate. It was this increased findability that led to the discovery of the collection by members of the Otoe-Missouria chapter of the American War Mothers, which in turn led to my own MA thesis project that connected the museum’s images and stories of veterans with the War Mothers’ own recollections.

One of the most delightful aspects of being a folklore archivist is that one can find lore—the documentation of traditions and of innovation within those traditions, as practiced and passed on by those outside the mainstream—in many different kinds of collections. Thus, once my graduate studies concluded, like many other twenty-first-century archivists, I pursued a professional path that has led to opportunities at a wide range of cultural and archival organizations.

The Department of Native American Languages at the Sam Noble Museum was one such institution. Situated within the University of Oklahoma’s natural history museum, the department maintains collections primarily composed of textual and audiovisual recordings of Native American languages. Language is, of course, a critical source of cultural information: regardless of the stories, music, or other information passed along when language is spoken, the words themselves document the structure of the speaker’s world and connect that individual with a community of other speakers. For some endangered languages that have few or no speakers—as was the case for many of those represented in the Native American Languages collection—archival recordings may preserve some of the last examples of this spoken lore.

The Department of Native American Languages was and continues to be a research resource for academic scholars, but it is also a resource for Native language speakers (some of whom are also scholars of those languages). Although the language collections themselves are its major attraction, the archive also offers many other events and services, including an audiovisual studio for recording speakers and musicians and the Oklahoma Native American Youth Language Fair, an annual competition that showcases language performances, art, videos, and other media from young language learners.

These and other activities I was involved in during my tenure at the museum—and that are ongoing—served to build goodwill with language speakers and communities and encouraged the creation of important new language recordings. This, in turn, frequently generated contributions to the Department of Native American Languages. For instance, although it was not required, speakers who used the audiovisual studio frequently chose to provide copies of their recordings to the archive. In addition, each Youth Language Fair was recorded on video for the archive by museum staff, with the knowledge and permission of the participants.

I learned many things at the Department of Native American Languages as a budding folklore archivist. I developed audiovisual preservation and digitization skills. I gained experience in the ways cultural archives can work directly with communities to create and collect new materials. Most importantly, however, I learned about the significance of building mutually beneficial connections between an archive and the individuals and communities its collections document.

The ability to create rapport with collaborators stood me in good stead throughout my time as an archival consultant in the Oklahoma City metropolitan area. I worked primarily with individual artists and art collectors, as well as with local art galleries and small nonprofits, to organize art and associated archival material (correspondence, exhibit catalogs, sales records, public relations documents, and so forth) and conduct collections research.

One of the major professional relationships I developed through this work was with Nicole Poole, the daughter of Oklahoma artist O. Gail Poole, a longtime fixture in the Oklahoma City arts community. When Nicole and I met, her father had passed away unexpectedly and left her hundreds of his paintings, dozens of sketchbooks, and boxes full of personal effects. I was originally connected to the O. Gail Poole Collection to manage the collection database. However, as I began creating catalog records and reviewing the art itself, patterns in Poole’s work began to emerge: art styles, motifs, particular landscapes, and specific people all appeared repeatedly in various incarnations.

Nicole Poole was interested in exploring her father’s art to tell the story of his professional life and artistic development. As we discussed the themes that were portrayed in Poole’s art, we began to document his personal history through Nicole’s remembrances and Poole’s own words, preserved in his archive of personal papers and the notes he’d written alongside the sketches in his sketchbooks. In partnership with Nicole, I began to collect additional stories from others who had worked with him: his longtime studio partner and other peers in the Oklahoma arts community, his personal friends, and even some of the models who appeared in his paintings.

Poole’s innovations within various artistic traditions, his depictions of people and places that were important to him, and the major events in his life were all personal lore that deeply influenced his substantial body of work. Through my collaboration with his daughter and through our story-centered efforts to document this information, his art has been further contextualized; this contextualization has, in turn, been used to enhance gallery exhibitions, news articles, and other means of connecting his works to the larger arts community of the state and region.

As I’ve established such connections with a wide range of archival collections—historic, institutional, and personal—I’ve also maintained connections with the folklore community, primarily via active involvement with regional organizations and the American Folklore Society. The pinnacle of these efforts has been my role as convener of the American Folklore Society’s Archives and Libraries Section, a position I have filled for several years: in this capacity, I work to link fellow folklore archivists to each other and to other professionals within the discipline. Throughout all of my archival endeavors, a folklore-informed approach has fulfilled my original goal: to use the stories documented in archival collections to connect to individuals and communities in an ever-changing world.

The most substantial change to my own life in recent years has been accepting the position of Fife Folklore Archives curator at Utah State University starting in fall 2020. The wealth of lore in the Fife Folklore Archives offers up a wide array of possibilities for community collaboration through work with archival materials. I look forward to learning the stories these new collections have to tell. And as I consider my professional journeys, I rest secure in the knowledge that regardless of wherever I may find myself, as a folklore archivist I will always find new stories to experience and new connections to make.

BUILDING AND PROVIDING ACCESS TO LIBRARY COLLECTIONS: MOIRA MARSH

Moira Marsh earned her MLS and PhD in folklore at Indiana University and is the folklore subject librarian at the Indiana University Libraries.

I am an accidental librarian. I trained to be a folklorist and a scholar, not a librarian, but for most of my career, I have happily been all three. As the subject librarian for folklore at Indiana University Bloomington, I care for a library collection that also came about almost by accident. As a subject librarian, I am both a collection curator and a research whisperer.

Great library collections are not created overnight; they’re curated and grown over many years. Put another way, the IU folklore collection is the living culmination of a decades-long tradition. It began, literally, as the books that IU folklore program founder Stith Thompson put on reserve for his students to use in comparative folktale studies courses. Initially confined to a small room, this reserve collection was moved intact to the current library building in 1969. At the same time, Polly Grimshaw was appointed as the first subject librarian for folklore. She was still there years later when I entered the IU graduate folklore program, and I worked as Polly’s folklore student assistant for most of my graduate studies. I thought I knew a thing or two about library research when I started, but she soon put me straight.

The folklore collection at the Indiana University Libraries is unique. In most academic libraries in the United States, “folklore” is understood as composed of the Library of Congress classifications beginning GR (folk literature) and GT (costume, food, calendar customs, and life-cycle rituals from birth to death). At Indiana University, these ranges make up barely two-thirds of the folklore collection, while the rest runs from A (museums) through Z (bibliography). If it is of interest to folklorists, we include it in the collection. Few of the individual books there are either rare or particularly valuable; what makes the collection unique and priceless is that everything that pertains to folklore, broadly conceived, is shelved together. This collocation is the outstanding feature of the collection, which now numbers almost 56,000 titles (and counting).

Institutional libraries operate on a massive scale by rationalizing their operations as much as possible: cataloging materials according to the same schemes, shelving them in order, and so on. By this standard, fully one-third of our folklore collection is shelved “out of place.” It runs crosswise of normal library operations, causing headaches for library patrons and staff, especially shelvers. If I were to approach the dean of libraries today and suggest creating a special collection on another subject from scratch by moving books from their proper locations so they could all be together, I am confident the proposal would go nowhere. The IU folklore collection began quietly and then just continued.

Curating this legacy involves managing finite space—and a generous but finite acquisitions budget. I decide which books need conservation treatment and which ones should be replaced because of loss or damage. As space for physical library collections is increasingly scarce, I work with catalogers to use metadata to create a “virtual” folklore collection encompassing everything that would interest folklorists, even though different parts of it may be shelved in remote storage or online rather than in traditional open-stacks library space.

Most important, though, is my daily work to identify and acquire new materials for the collection, including some gifts. The collection’s scope is intended to include any academic book, journal, or database that pertains to the study of folklore, encompassing all genres, all parts of the field and related disciplines, all parts of the world, and all languages. I also acquire a selected number of popular publications as primary material for folkloristic study. Accordingly, I cannot rely solely on the usual collection development tools. Drawing on my direct knowledge of the scope of research in folklore and ethnomusicology, I scour monograph catalogs in several western European languages, from both academic or popular publishers and small or regional presses. Book reviews and social media posts are another source. I also rely on gifts and tips from folklorist colleagues from around the world.

The Jokebooks by Frog are one example. One day, IU alumnus Jens Lund, then the Washington State folklorist, sent me a parcel of homemade, paperbound jokebooks he had bought from a peddler at an Oregon street fair. The peddler, known everywhere as Frog, made his living in part by compiling, copying, and selling cheap jokebooks on the street. For years, Jens has bought all of them on behalf of the Indiana University Libraries, and our collection now holds at least eighty of them. The University of Oregon Library is the only other library in the world that holds the complete set. One folklorist’s eye at a street fair and another folklorist’s eye in the library together recognized this one of-a-kind gem and ensured it would be preserved and made accessible for folkloristic research now and in the future.

Many people think librarians get to read books all day. Ironically, although I work in a building packed with three million volumes, I rarely have time to read. Most often, when I open a book, it is only for a few fleeting minutes—just long enough to glean the fact or quote I am looking for, usually on behalf of somebody else. When a library collection achieves the strong reputation that the Indiana University folklore collection has, it attracts researchers from all walks of life and all around the globe. I provide research consultations and answer reference questions for anyone interested in folklore, including students, folklorists, and members of the public. Sometimes I use these interactions as clues for further collection development directions or refer inquiries to colleagues in folklore archives and other special collections both at Indiana University and elsewhere. My knowledge of the collection, my awareness of current work in folklore, and my own practice as folkloristic researcher and writer all contribute to my role as a research whisperer. Handling reference questions requires the librarian to transform the patron’s query into an answerable question. This transformation is accomplished in the reference interview, where my folklorist’s training in how to listen, ask questions, and elucidate context comes into play. I do not just answer questions: I show people how to find the answers for themselves and recommend information management tools with which they can manage their research.

Although my official constituency is made up of Indiana University faculty and students, I see my work as building a research collection for the entire field of folklore. In addition, my mission as both folklorist and librarian is to serve the source communities whose traditions are presented, described, and analyzed in the works in the collection. The sheer size and comprehensiveness of the collection attracts queries from both lay and academic researchers worldwide. It also creates unique opportunities for collaborative projects, including the Indiana University Folklore Archives, the Modern Language Association Bibliography Project, and the Open Folklore Project.

I am not an archivist, but libraries and archives are closely related. I have had the privilege of referring numerous people to IU’s Folklore Archives and the Archives of Traditional Music to find the stories and recordings some folklorist collected from his or her grandparents a generation ago. I mediated between the folklorists and archivists on our campus to find a permanent home for the folklore archives, which began life as a file cabinet in Richard Dorson’s office. We have improved access to the holdings of the archives, started an active acquisitions program, and mentored student interns who have worked in the archives.

The Modern Language Association International Bibliography (MLAIB) is the go-to index for scholarly publications in folklore studies. I was a graduate student working in the folklore collection in the 1980s when the MLA approached Indiana University for assistance in getting access to publications in folklore. Simply put, our collection included many things the MLA could not access. I helped create a kind of bibliographer field office for contributing bibliographic records to the MLAIB, with support from both the MLA and the Ameri...