Collecting Memories: Oral Histories of American Folklorists is a joint effort by the American Folklore Society and Utah State University Special Collections and Archives . The American Folklife Center at The Library of Congress is the project advisor. Collecting Memories is an effort to collect, preserve and disseminate the voices and images of American folklorists and the field of folklore studies through oral histories (memories and personal commentary) and related materials (photographs, curriculum vitae, personal papers, diaries, logs, etc).
The project will help document the development and change of the field since the mid-twentieth century to more fully tell the story of folklore scholarship and to make accessible the institutional memory of the American Folklore Society, the premier folklore society in the United States. Project products (media, transcripts/logs, images and affiliated materials) will be housed at Utah State University, the official repository of the American Folklore Society Records: MSS 206. USU will host the products of the project in both physical and digital collections.
In October 2009, Randy Williams (Utah State University) proposed the project to Tim Lloyd (Executive Director American Folklore Society) and Michael Taft (Head of the Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress). All parties agreed to participate. Simon Bronner and Jill Terry Rudy (members of the American Folklore Society History Section) and Guha Shankar (Folklife Specialist, Research and Programs, American Folklife Center, LOC) were invited to help Lloyd, Taft and Williams draft the project forms. Williams applied to USU's Institutional Review Board for IRB approval, which was awarded: USU IRB protocol number 2761. The project was introduced at the 2010 American Folklore Society Meeting in Nashville, TN, by Bronner, Lloyd, Rudy, Taft and Williams.
Members of the American Folklore Society (and their students) are invited to participate in the project by being interviewed or by interviewing a member of the society. Project forms are available to guide the process. For history of folklorist oral history efforts see Simon Bronner's "American Folklorists' Voices in Print: A Critical Survey" (2011 Folklore Historian).
From the guide to the Collecting Memories: Oral Histories of American Folklorists, 2011, (Utah State University. Merrill-Cazier Library. Special Collections and Archives.)
