Open Folklore Project receives ALCTS Outstanding Collaboration Award

CHICAGO - The Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) is pleased to award the 2010 ALCTS Outstanding Collaboration Citation to the Open Folklore project. Open Folklore is a collaborative project developed by the American Folklore Society (AFS), and the Indiana University-Bloomington Libraries (IUL). The project, which debuted in October 2010, established an online portal to provide open online access to many useful -- but heretofore difficult to access -- research materials in the field of folklore studies, including books, journals, "gray literature" (unpublished) and websites.

Open Folklore serves as a new model for collection development and scholarly communication for building digital collections of the future. Besides providing open access to research materials, the portal at the Open Folklore project offers full-text searching of these materials and allows folklore scholars and enthusiasts to identify and select reliable scholarly content, differentiating it from a sea of popular, and sometimes, unreliable, “Googalized” online content. The Open Folklore project also actively works to encourage partnerships, by encouraging its partners to collaboratively digitize materials, place them in open-access digital repositories and share them with the folklore community. The project’s website is located at http://www.openfolklore.org.

The citation will be presented at the ALCTS Awards Ceremony at the American Library Association Annual Conference, to be held in June 2011 in New Orleans.

The ALCTS Outstanding Collaboration Citation recognizes and encourages collaborative problem-solving efforts in the areas of acquisition, access, management, preservation or archiving of library materials. It recognizes a demonstrated benefit from actions, services or products that improve and benefit the provision and management of library collections.

The Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) is the national association for information providers who work in collections and technical services, such as acquisitions, cataloging, collection development, preservation and continuing resources in digital and print formats.

ALCTS is a division of the American Library Association.