A forward from another list that may be of interest to some:

FOLK HERITAGE COLLECTIONS IN CRISIS
A Symposium

Across the nation folklorists, oral historians, ethnomusicologists and
community documentarians have been collecting and recording the American
cultural legacy on audio tape, video tape, film, still photography and
in
other media.  These grassroots efforts, many in place for several
generations, are the local foundation for larger, professional archives,
universities, libraries and museums that serve as repositories for the
nation's folk heritage collections.  Both the local documentary
materials
and the professional archival collections are in peril as America enters
the new millennium.

To begin to address this issue, the American Folklife Center will hold a
symposium December 1-2, 2000, which focuses on unpublished audio
recordings
in the nation's folklife collections.  The symposium will bring together
experts from the fields of folklore, ethnomusicology, entertainment law,
copyright law, audio engineering, archiving and preservation, oral
history
and museum studies to discuss issues involved in and produce
recommendations for guidelines on preservation, access and intellectual
property rights. Partners for the project are the American Folklore
Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the NEA, the NEH and the
Council
for Library and Information Resources [CLIR].

There are three primary challenges that confront the guardians of
America's
folk heritage collections today:

¨ Preservation: The living traditions of the nation are captured in a
multitude of media formats, and each medium presents new and unique
problems in terms of shelf life and stability.  There is no consensus on
the advisability of one form over another.  No matter the medium, our
field
tapes are disintegrating rapidly.  There is an immediate need to develop
national guidelines for preservation of folklife collections in a range
of
formats.
¨ Access: In an age where archives are increasingly linked
electronically,
there is an urgent and long overdue need to develop national standards
for
cataloguing collections-to develop a common vocabulary and keywords for
universal accessibility of folk materials.  Standards are needed to
guide
the preparation of finding aids and to agree upon subject access
terminology.
¨ Permissions and Intellectual Property Rights: Guidelines are needed
for
balancing the need for public access to the collections of American folk
heritage with the need for fair compensation and privacy rights
protection
of those we document.  As more collections are digitized for on-line
access, the question of intellectual property rights is made even more
complex.

The first step in better serving our folk heritage collections is to
understand the state of the collections across the nation in respect to
the
three challenges discussed above.  The American Folklife Center will
accomplish this through a base-line quantitative survey of folklife
collections in the United States.  The survey will not be limited to
only
large institutional archives, but will include individual and community
collections as well.  The Center and its partners in the project
recognize
that much of the audio recordings in peril are located outside folklore
institutions or on office shelves.  To ensure that a sampling of such
individual and small collections take part in the survey, the
memberships
of AFS and SEM along with collections at state agencies, museums,
libraries, ethnic organizations, and universities will form the
foundation
of the respondent list.

The survey will be mailed in July of 2000 and will also be available
on-line at the AFC, AFS and SEM websites.  The preliminary data from the
survey will be presented at the October meeting of the American Folklore
Society and shall be an integral part of the symposium discussion in
December and the recommendations that emerge from this gathering.

If you know of any collections that should receive a survey, or for more
information on the Symposium or the survey, please contact the Project
Coordinator, Kelly Feltault, at 301-587-1540 or by email at
[log in to unmask]

Please post this announcement to other interested lists.

Kelly Feltault    email: [log in to unmask]
Cultural Crossings
Independent Folklorist and Oral Historian
Ass't Liaison from OHA to AFS
OHA 2000 Workshop Coordinator

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