Home July 2002 Vol 63 No 4 Folk book review

College and Research Libraries
July 2002, Vol. 63, No. 4

Book Review

Folk Heritage Collections in Crisis. Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2001. 63p. $15 (ISBN 1887334823).

At the heart of the crisis is the deterioration and terminal neglect of local documentary sound collections and professional audio archives. In December 2000, at the Library of Congress, the American Folklore Society (AFS) and the American Folklife Center collaborated with a select group of experts to formulate recommendations for the access, preservation, and rights management of America’s folk heritage sound collections and to propose “a strategy for addressing this crisis in a collaborative way.” Major supporters of this conference were the Council on Library and Information Resources, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The three commissioned contributions were those in which ethnomusicologist Virginia Danielson addressed access; audio engineer Elizabeth Cohen, preservation; and ethnomusicologist Anthony Seeger, intellectual property rights. The papers, which comprise the major portion of this report, were sent to participants in advance of the conference to facilitate informed discussion. Prior to the conference, major folklore repositories and selected AFS members were surveyed concerning the audio materials in their collections; Appendix II is a summary of the survey results. A final discussion and recommendations conclude this report.

Appendix I lists the names of the invited participants. Among them are engineers, preservation experts, lawyers, librarians, archivists, community folklorists, and faculty whose conversations led to the cross-fertilization of ideas needed to find new approaches to these old problems.

In her talk, Virginia Danielson responds to many suggestions made by John Suter in his remarks about her paper, “Stating the Obvious: Lessons Learned Attempting Access to Archival Audio Collections.” Suter had suggested that we accession important collections, process collections for accessibility in-house, describe collections online with collection-level records in MARC or other standard formats, produce finding aids on the Web, and make archival collections available on the Web. Danielson points out that some collections require specialized subject and language skills to prepare even the most rudimentary inventories; that skilled catalogers will be needed; that knowledge of mark-up language is required for electronic documentation; that special skills and equipment are necessary for audio digitization; and that metadata systems need to be developed and used to accomplish these tasks. Also, the stability of these library resources, durability of the technologies and products created, and issues of obsolescence must not be ignored.

Danielson describes a 1999 project, “Music from the Archives,” which she offered as a starting point for a discussion on access. As part of that discussion, she suggested that encoded archival description (EAD) is inadequate for describing folklore materials and that we need to develop a new document-type definition for sound recordings. Another concern for the folklore community is that no controlled vocabulary exists to permit reasonable subject access or the use of networked search and retrieval protocols.

In her remarks on “Preservation of Audio,” Elizabeth Cohen declares that “distribution is the key to preserving audio folklore collections in the twenty-first century…. In the networked world, collections may be located in a thousand places.” Both technophobia and politics hamper progress in the migration of collections from the analog to the digital domain. She presents a compelling case for data migration as the “only intelligent policy” and advises the archival community to look to the data storage industry and to pay attention to research and development efforts across a variety of disciplines for the purpose of discovering new solutions and for formulating their own preservation strategies. A significant portion of her presentation is devoted to current and emerging technologies in data storage media.

Issues surrounding rights management are clarified by Anthony Seeger in his paper, “Intellectual Property and Audiovisual Archives and Collections.” Intellectual property issues are not only legal (what people can do), but also ethical (what people should do). In consideration of the legal and ethical issues and in the interest of preservation and access, archives should review their contracts, reexamine guidelines for evaluating proposals for use of archival materials, help researchers obtain the access they need, and help artists and communities learn about their rights. To explain why collections of commercial recordings and collections of unpublished recordings require different approaches, Seeger traces specific cultural biases in copyright legislation to their origins in the Enlightenment.

In a brief discussion of archives and the internet, Seeger states that the technology is far ahead of the archives’ ability to use it, primarily because archives do not have the rights to distribute materials digitally. He urges “institutions in custody of traditional materials to periodically conduct a systematic review of how they manage their access and use rights” and to renegotiate outdated agreements that do not address new media rights.

The concluding discussion and recommendations call for continued collaboration and the formation of interdisciplinary committees and advocacy groups within the folk heritage community. The consensus affirmed, among other things, the need to “develop best practices guidelines and standards; to develop better education and training opportunities for all community members; to develop partnerships among the technology, corporate and entertainment sectors; to extend the reach of expertise and resources to regional and local levels; and to establish regional centers for preservation and distributed access when appropriate.” Twenty-seven specific recommendations conclude the report.—Rashidah Z. Hakeem, University of Mississippi.