Survey of Public Folklore Collections in the Upper Midwest 2005-2006 Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures University of Wisconsin-Madison csumc.wisc.edu Location of publicly-funded folklore fieldwork collections in the Upper Midwest Survey of Public Folklore Collections in the Upper Midwest 2005-2006 Author: Nicole Saylor Editors: Ruth E. Olson, Janet C. Gilmore, and Karen J. Baumann Online Adaptation: Mary Hoefferle, Karen J. Baumann, and Janet C. Gilmore Publisher: Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures 901 University Bay Drive Madison, WI 53705 http://csumc.wisc.edu The “Survey of Public Folklore Collections in the Upper Midwest, 2005- 2006” report was first printed and distributed in Summer 2007. This Winter 2009 online version of the survey includes modifications based on responses from survey participants. The publication of this report, and the survey on which it is based, were made possible with funding from a National Historical Publications and Records Commission grant, 2005-2006. Additional funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, and advisory assistance from folklorists and archivists regionally and nationally, have supported research leading to the survey and following from it. 2 INDEX Overview.......................................................................................................................................4 Survey Findings.............................................................................................................................8 Key to Collection Profile Charts That Follow...............................................................................11 Illinois Collections.........................................................................................................................12 Iowa Collections............................................................................................................................21 Michigan Collections.....................................................................................................................25 Minnesota Collections....................................................................................................................28 Missouri Collections......................................................................................................................32 Wisconsin Collections....................................................................................................................40 3 Survey of Public Folklore Collections in the Upper Midwest A Report from the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures By Nicole Saylor Overview Across the nation and over several generations, folklorists, oral historians, ethnomusicologists, and community documenters have been collecting and recording the American cultural legacy on audiotape, videotape, and film and in still photography. Many of these efforts have become the foundation for larger professional, university, and library archives that are repositories for the nation’s folk heritage collections. Both the local documentary sound materials and professional archival audio collections are at risk of deterioration and terminal neglect as America enters a new century. –Folk Heritage Collections in Crisis, a report published by the Council on Library and Information Resources, Washington D.C., May 2001 Six years after the folklore community declared folk heritage collections “in crisis,” a yearlong survey of publicly-funded fieldwork documentation in six states—Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Michigan’s western Upper Peninsula—confirms the judgment in the Upper Midwest. The region’s collections of recorded interviews, slides, video, and other ethnographic documentation mostly are not publicly accessible, contain outdated and sometimes deteriorating formats, and lack permissions regarding subsequent use. Several need a permanent archival home. Many that have found their way to institutional repositories still need significant processing and preservation work. With support from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHRPC), from July 2005 through June 2006, staff at the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures (CSUMC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison conducted a survey to identify and appraise archival collections that contain publicly-funded documentation of traditional arts, with an emphasis on those generated within the last 30 years from National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Folk Arts funding. Conversing with more than 80 folklorists, archivists, anthropologists, and other cultural workers, and visiting 12 sites, archivist Nicole Saylor discovered more than 50 discrete collections in 4 more than 20 locations, including institutional repositories, private and public non-profit organizations, and private hands. Regional documentation gathered since the emergence of the National Endowment for the Arts Folk Arts Program in the 1970s is vast and varied. Upper Midwestern institutional repositories contain recorded interviews that document subjects as diverse as mule workers in western Missouri to Mississippi River maritime workers, and rag-rug weavers from the far southern tip of Illinois to the northernmost point of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In the basements, closets, and file drawers of non-profit organizations are amazing collections that include slides and hours of raw footage and recorded interviews with Amana tinsmiths and willow-basket weavers in Iowa and traditional Norwegian-American instrument- makers in Wisconsin. A few folklorists’ basements are full of gems—one-of-a-kind recordings of Missouri folk singers both famous and forgotten, footage of a nationally renowned Lao weaver from St. Louis, and interviews with lure-makers and anglers in central and northern Minnesota. This survey expands CSUMC’s ongoing work to preserve and make accessible the region’s folklore collections. A 2003-2004 NEA Heritage, Preservation, and Access grant, led by folklorist Janet C. Gilmore, supported a survey of Wisconsin and border areas that identified more than 50 public folklore projects, and resulted in the creation of searchable online collection guides for 12 of them, based on models adapted and synthesized from several sources, including the American Folklife Center and Wisconsin Historical Society. These guides are now posted at the “Public Folk Arts and Folklife Projects of the Upper Midwest” website, where they are periodically updated and joined by new ones added since the completion of this survey: http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/WIArchives.CSUMC. The “Survey of Public Folklore Collections in the Upper Midwest” sponsored by NHPRC has allowed CSUMC to create this summary of the region’s folklore fieldwork holdings. Descriptions here use an abbreviated version of the collection guide data fields and can 5 quickly point researchers to documentary materials. However, with the exception of a few institutional repositories, the record holders often lack the means to provide adequate public access through playback equipment, inventories, finding aids, or staff, for example. Through this report’s state-by-state accounts of publicly-funded folklore collections, and through in-depth site visit reports produced from this survey, which are gradually being adapted for the online collection guide website (above), it is hoped that CSUMC will not only aid researchers but also encourage record holders to secure archives preservation funding or negotiate a transfer of records to a suitable archival home. Ideally, this information will energize local, state, regional, and national initiatives to preserve folklore fieldwork collections in perpetuity. CSUMC project staff first built an electronic master list and database of NEA Folk Arts grants awarded in the region from the mid-1970s through 2005 to identify fieldwork projects that had occurred there. Saylor then began contacting award recipients to learn what had become of any fieldwork documentation associated with their grant-funded projects. As she identified record holders, she asked them to complete an online survey that she and other staff had developed using resources from other repositories and archives. (See http://csumc.wisc.edu:16080/collections/) Because only three record holders filled out the online form, and most provided incomplete information, Saylor began gathering information by email and telephone. By the end of October 2005, the regional documentation picture began to emerge and Saylor chose 12 sites to visit: Washington, D.C.; Charleston, Illinois; Carbondale, Illinois; Macomb, Illinois; Amana, Iowa; Des Moines, Iowa; Dubuque, Iowa; Columbia, Missouri; St. Louis, Missouri; Cedarburg, Wisconsin; Madison, Wisconsin; and East Lansing, Michigan. For each site, Saylor prepared a field report that assessed the uniqueness of the information held, its usefulness and accessibility, and noted any preservation or permissions issues. 6 Because a survey like this is labor intensive, and public funds scarce, this undertaking necessarily focused on only a small selection of collections, so these findings are only suggestive of the bigger picture. Additional survey work to identify and appraise more publicly- and privately-funded folklore fieldwork collections, oral histories, and other regional ethnographic collections would indeed lead to a far fuller picture of Upper Midwestern folklore holdings. 7 Survey Findings The condition of the region’s publicly-funded folk arts collections ranged