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Brenda McCallum Prize

Archives and Libraries Section

The Brenda McCallum Prize — AFS Archives and Libraries Section

Submissions Due: September 15, 2008

Award: $100

The Brenda McCallum Prize committee of the American Folklore Society Archives and Libraries Section invites nominations for the 2008 Brenda McCallum Prize.

The 2008 Prize Committee is composed of Kristi A. Young (chair), Stephanie Smith, and Jodine Perkins.

Nominations are accepted continuously during the year, though the deadline for submitting materials each year is September 15. Presentation of the awards is given during the Archives and Libraries Section meeting at the Annual meeting of the American Folklore Society in October of that year.

Since 1994, the AFS Archives and Libraries Section has awarded a prize honoring the late folklife archivist Brenda McCallum. Through this prize, the AFS Archives and Libraries Section seeks to promote works that further the cause of the preservation, organization, and dissemination of folklife collections. The prize is given for an exceptional work dealing with folklife archives or the collection, organization, and management of ethnographic materials. It is awarded to an individual or an institution for noteworthy products or documented activities that provide education, techniques, or services to those who collect, organize, and preserve folklife materials, either on the individual or institutional level. These may or may not be directly associated with archival work, since products that facilitate the organization of ethnographic materials collected in the field ultimately assist the cause of folklife archivists as well. The prize may be awarded for such accomplishments as a book, an article, the development of a software package, or a lecture series. In 2007 the prize was shared by two outstanding projects.

Janet C. Gilmore (Department of Landscape Architecture and the Folklore Program) and her archiving team won the prize for their survey report on the region’s wealth of public folklore archival collections, and their creation of a growing repository of detailed online collection guides that provide project histories and virtually organize the scattered yet rich documentary record.

The Survey of Public Folklore Collections in the Upper Midwest, 2005-2006 report, funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, resulted from a survey of key public folk arts and folklife collections identified in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Wisconsin and the western Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  Archivist Nicole Saylor visited repositories, inventoried collections, assessed conditions and accessibility, and prepared the draft report.  A revised online version of the report will debut in 2008 on the CSUMC web site. 

Since 2006, Janet Gilmore, Nicole Saylor, and Karen Baumann have overseen the publication of eighteen collection guides as “Public Folk Arts and Folklife Projects of the Upper Midwest” in the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections’ Archival Resources in Wisconsin: Descriptive Finding Aids (http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/w/wiarchives/csumc.html).  Developed with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, these resources capture project histories and convey a comprehensive sense of the ethnographic documentation created from public folk arts projects conducted in the Upper Midwest from the 1970s on.  The online guides virtually organize collections that often are scattered over several repositories, and make the material much more accessible to scholars and the general public.

Laurie Sommers and her associates won for the website for the South Georgia Folklife Collection housed in the Archives and Special Collections of Odum Library at Valdosta State University was the other recipient. This multi0genre ethnographic collection is an outgrowth of the South Georgia Folklife Project, founded by Dr. Laurie Sommers in 1996. It reflects ten years of field documentation and public programs from 1996-2006. Highlights of the collection include Southeast Georgia Sacred Harp, Okefenokee Music Survey, Flint River fisheries, Traditons of Turpentiners, Folkwriting (Lessons on Place, Heritage and Traditions for the Georgia Classroom), online exhibits, and a radio archives of documentary programs originally broadcast on NPR affiliates.

This collection is organized into 13 series which reflect topical foci. The series for the collection are as follows: South Georgia Folklife Project General, Resources (books, articles, commercial audio and video recordings), Vertical File (organized topically and geographically), Sacred Harp, Turpentine, Suckerfish, Okefenokee, Folkwriting, Sounds of South Georgia (radio and accompanying fieldwork on diverse cultural groups), Wiregrass (radio and exhibit materials,and copies os some documentation from the original 1977 Library of Congress field survey titled “the South Central Georgia Folklife Project”), Last Harvest (seasonal and agricultural workers), Exploring Community Heritage, and Student Projects (from courses taught by Laurie K. Sommers).

Congratulations to those involved in these wonderful projects.

In order to receive the McCallum Prize, the work should have been created during the twelve months prior to the deadline for its submission, or twenty-four months if it was not previously nominated.

Please submit nominations for the Prize by e-mail to the chair of the committee, including a brief explanation of why the work has been nominated.

Past recipients and their research topics have included:

1994:

Jeff Place of the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage of the Smithsonian Inssitution, for preservation work done on the Woody Guthrie acetates which led to the publication of the Guthrie album Long Ways to Travel: The Unreleased Folkways Masters, 1944-49. Jeff described the process of preservation in the liner notes.
 

1995:

The New York Folklore Society, for its publication Working with Folk Materials in New York State: A Manual for Folklorists and Archivists (1994).
 

1996:

Stephanie A. Hall for her publication: "Ethnographic Collections in the Archive of Folk Culture: A Contributor's Guide."
 

1997:

Margaret R. Dittemore and Fred J. Hay, for the volume they edited, Documenting Cultural Diversity in the Resurgent South: Collectors, Collecting, and Collections. (1997)
 

1999:

James Corsaro and Karen Taussig-Lux, for their manual Folklore in Archives: A Guide to Describing Folklore and Folklife Materials. (1998)
 

2001:

Steve Weiss and the Manuscripts Department of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for their online multi-format collection of materials from the Goldband Recording Corporation Records at the Southern Folklife Collection. (2000)
 

2002:

Michael Owen Jones and the many students and contributors at UCLA who edited, expanded, and created the Online Archive of American Folk Medicine, for research into beliefs and practices relating to folk medicine and alternative health care, begun by Wayland D. Hand in the 1940s. (2001)
 

2003:

The Veterans History Project team, led by Peggy Bulger and Ellen McCulloch-Lovell of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and Timothy Lloyd at The American Folklore Society, for their collaborative effort to collect, preserve and make available audio- and video-taped oral histories, along with documentary materials, of America's war veterans and those who served in support of them. In awarding this prize, we would like to acknowledge the expert team of archivists and processing staff at the VHP that are managing this huge collection, the oral history trainers, and all the volunteers and veterans who are gathering and sharing stories for this important national project.

The James Madison Carpenter Collection Online Catalogue project team, led by Dr. Julia Bishop of the University of Sheffield, in collaboration with the University of Aberdeen and Jennifer A. Cutting at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress for their effort to make the James Madison Carpenter Collection available. In awarding this prize, we would like to acknowledge Bishop's colleagues David Atkinson, Elaine Bradtke, Eddie Cass, Thomas A. McKean, and Robert Young Walser, as well as Cutting's colleagues Marcia K. Segal and Michael Taft.

2005:

The Florida Folklife Digitization and Education Project of the Florida State Archives for their online web presentation of folklife collections in the archive.
 

2006:

No prize was awarded in 2006.
 

 

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