>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D. C. >> Elizabeth Peterson: Good morning, everyone. >> Good morning. >> Elizabeth Peterson: It's such a beautiful day and you all are such a beautiful sight to look at. Welcome to the Library of congress. I'm Betsy Peterson, the director of the American Folk Life Center here. And I'm not going to talk too long because the staff of the center is going to talk about our collections and work that we do in greater detail. But the leadership of NABS approached us last spring to talk about what we could do and how we could work together for your conference. And so we're really excited. We've been meeting with Dilan Pritchard for several months and talking with him on the phone. So I hope we've got a good program here for you today. But I think given the title or theme of the conference in the tradition, I think you've come to the right place. I would certainly hope so. And I think we have a lot of materials, a lot of primary resources that can inform and connect with the work that you do, with the stories that you tell. And actually I think Zora Neale Hurston has about the best definition of folklore ever. Which is folklore is the boiled down juice of human living. And I think that kind of about sums it up. So we do have that boiled down juice here. And please come back and come back often. Before I turn it over to the staff, I just wanted to say one word, just a note of remembrance about a colleague, friend, mentor, Gladys Marie Fry, who I know many of you knew. She was a great friend to folklore. And a great mentor to many folkoreists as well. She was a professor at the University of Maryland, has written two fabulous books, Night Riders and Black Folk History, and Stitch from the Soul: Slave Quilts from the Antebellum South. And we're very sad to hear of her passing. We know you are too, but we know her spirit is with us here today. And I think throughout your gathering. So with that said, I'm going to turn this over to Todd Harvey, the curator, one of the curators, reference librarians here at the American Folk Life Center. And actually two words. There are cups, water in the back. Please get some water if you need some. I know some of you have found the restrooms, but if you need to find the restrooms, talk to some of our staff. And we'll get you all set up. And hi there. Okay. Todd Harvey. [ Applause ] >> Todd Harvey: Good morning, good morning. I take the podium in gratitude, and I think that you know why. It's because we work in the same field and that is preserving tradition and continuing tradition. And I do it from my place, which is to take care of the stuff. And you do it out there in the world. And we're all part of the same process. I have a few words that I think will help us focus on the talks today. And I get to talk about the Library of Congress which is the oldest federal institution, cultural institution. The world's preeminent reservoir of knowledge, providing unparalleled integrated resources to Congress and the American people. That's the big bold: the American people. Founded in 1800, the library seeks to further human understanding, wisdom, by providing access to knowledge through its magnificent collections. So we are the largest library in the world, which means we have the largest collection of storytelling in the world by default. And most of those are here at the American Folk Life Center. So let me tell you, the American Folk Life Center was created in 1976 by an act of Congress, through programs of research, documentation, archival preservation, reference service, live performance, exhibits, publications and training. The American Folk Life Center archive, established by the Library of Congress Music Division in 1928, is now one of the world's largest archives of ethnographic materials from the United States and around the world. Most of our materials and our programs and our services to you are found on our website, and it's a great thing to explore. You can waste hours and hours of time looking at it. I curate the Lomax Collections here at the American Folk Life Center. And they are some of the earliest documentation. The Lomax's ran our archive in the 1930's. And so what I thought I would do, just to start things off, is to play a couple of examples of Lomax materials. This isn't strictly storytelling, but it's personal narrative. It's spoken word materials. And I think it will give you some insight into what we have in our collections. And so the Lomax's, here's Mr. Lomax, John Lomax with an unidentified man. Maybe someone will know who he is. Probably somewhere in Georgia. Here's the younger Lomax, with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, these guys. Recording girls singing in San Antonio 1934. Alan Lomax in action in the 1980's, explaining to the world why cultural equity is the way we should all live. So I want to play you an example. This is [inaudible] since 1939. But the dust jacket you can see is side A number two, The Cat's Story. [ Inaudible ] So he places himself in a traditional tale, right? It reminds me of some of the jack tales, the kind of magical cat who appears and disappears in the haunted house. And you know, it's a motif that you find all over American storytelling. But in this case it's from Texas and there he is. I guess he was a mule driver. So the next performer I have for you, Alan Lomax called her the greatest voice in American song, Vera Hall from northwestern Alabama, from Livingstone area Alabama. And he recorded her in 1948 for about 15 hours. He did oral history with her. And it was the only time I believe she left Alabama. He brought her up to New York to make these recordings. And the recorded her first in 1937 and last in 1959. So at the American Folk Life Center archive we have a lot of Vera Hall recordings. And this is one of her best, The Wild Ox Moan. [ Singing ] [ Applause ] [ Inaudible ] Of course the library has Bessy Smith recordings. [ Laughter ] Not today, but we can certainly help you when you come back. I know Bessy Smith was quite famous. I would listen to Vera Hall alongside with her I think. So I have one more. I love that, because it's improvised, right? And she's talking about what's happening today and it feels like it could go on as long as it needed to go on. And do you have a question? >> Yes. You know what, I understand also that -- [ Inaudible ] [ Laughter ] >> Todd Harvey: Do I know? I was listening but I can't tell you what the words were. It is online, for what it's worth. Let's listen to one more. This is Mohave Plantation, Moon Lake. It's in one of those Islands in the Mississippi in Coahoma County. And this is a nighttime service that they recorded in a little country church. And this is near the end of it, so it's hard to imagine this has been going on for an hour. And what I love about this is it has multilayered events going on at the same time, right? And so there is preaching, there is singing and there is some speaking. So I just have a little bit of it to play for you and you're going to have to come back and listen to the whole thing. [ Laughter ] [ Singing ] [ Shouting and cheering ] [ Applause ] All right, so I can imagine there might be a few questions. But I want to -- Thea says I can take a question or two. But we have to move on soon because there are lots of people to talk to today. >> Elizabeth Peterson: We have about five minutes to take a couple of questions and I have a microphone so that it's easy for Todd to hear you. >> Do your recordings have English subtitles? >> Todd Harvey: No, they do not. These are archival recordings. These are discs and things like that, the real thing. >> Is there a way to go online to get some of this information? >> Todd Harvey: Yes. >> What do you do to go online? >> Todd Harvey: American Folk Life Center website. >> That's it? Okay, thank you. >> Elizabeth Peterson: Also, if you look in your packets, Dana Bell has created -- one of our amazing staff people here at the Library of Congress -- has compiled a guide to resources that are online that you can access remotely. She's here at the back of the room and she'll be here during the break. You can ask questions. Dana, can you raise your hand? Here she is. She created this resource guide. >> Todd Harvey: Thank you, Dana. >> I just wanted to suggest that I know that some of the words may be a little bit difficult to understand, but I would hope that most of us can appreciate the sounds and the feeling and the emotion. Understanding the period that the people had come through. So I don't think we have to know the exact words. We should hopefully be able to surmise what that whole experience was about. We're from that root. >> Todd Harvey: Thank you. >> I just want to share a quick statement. I don't know how many of you saw me do Voices of Courage. I did it in let's see, when we were in Little Rock, right? So when I went to study, when I got to IB Wells, I wanted to include folk life and I wanted to do games. And so when I came to the Library of Congress I looked up Vera Hall. And I couldn't get the exact region, but I got the south. And I used Vera Hall when I played the Game Song, The Courting Song. I used Vera Hall's Courting Song to say that at this age she would be courting IB Wells, but she couldn't court because her parents died. And I sing that song with the audience, just to let you know how to use this work. >> Todd Harvey: So I want to answer more questions, but I think it's time for us to move on. I'll be here after this. Okay, go ahead. [ Inaudible ] >> Elizabeth Peterson: Hang on just one second. >> I don't think I need this. I look around and I see so many people here that have these stories and everything and a lot of us have made that transition. Is there a way that we as a group can start recording our stories so that they can be found? You know, so that the younger generation that comes after us can hear it? Because I heard the Vera Hall. I remember my aunt singing those songs and things to me. I said, "Dang, I didn't even know it." And I'm a librarian. I didn't even know. So what is the best way for someone to have their stories recorded? Do you have any type of program where they have their stories recorded so it can be added to the archive, to the Folk Life? >> Todd Harvey: There are ways. I will make you a deal. If you as a group will record your oral histories, we will put them in the Library of Congress. [ Applause ] >> Elizabeth Peterson: Also, just to let you know that our staff member Guha Shankar will be talking more about field work later on today in your sessions. But let's thank Todd Harvey. [ Applause ] >> Todd Harvey: Well, my stuff is what you want to hear. What Megan is going to talk about is what you have to hear. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Megan Harris: Wow, that was quite a lead-in. Thanks, Todd. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for coming. Good morning. I don't know that I've ever presented to as enthusiastic an audience as this. It's really wonderful and it puts me at ease because I am not a performer whatsoever. So you'll have to bear with me a little bit. Great. Todd's presentation was actually a great lead-in to my presentation because I am from the Veterans History Project. I am the reference specialist at the Veterans History Project. And we're part of the American Folk Life Center here at the Library. And it's a project that you can take part in and donate stories of veterans. So it's a great lead-in to the question about how can our stories be part of the library here. All right. Let's see. Okay. So in case you don't know about the Veterans History Project, our mission is to collect, preserve and make accessible the stories of America's War Veterans. And we were established by Congress in 2000. And since 2000 we're celebrating our 15th anniversary this year. Since 2000, we've collected over 99,000 individual narratives. So quite a lot. And our emphasis is really on the social and cultural experience. Not so much the military history experience. We're not so much about charting how battles were won and how different regiments took part in a glorious victory. It's really more about what the experience of being in the military was all about, how it felt, how basic training felt. How it felt to leave your family. Those sorts of experiential feelings. And we do this by asking the general public, so folks such as yourself, to interview the veteran in your life and then donate the oral history to us here at the library. We archive it and make it accessible to researchers who are working on Ph. D dissertations, who are working on documentaries, who might just be wanting to know more about their own family history. We make these stories accessible both in the reading room here at the library as well as online. So in terms of our African American holdings, stories of African American veterans, these are some of the photos that we have that have been donated to us. All of these folks here have taken part in our project. We have over 3,000 stories of veterans who have self-identified as African American. And you can see that out of the 99,000, 3,000 is only a small part. And it really has to do with the fact that we are dependent on the general public not only for the stories, but for the information about the veterans. So we can only count a story if someone has self-identified as African American. This is what we call metadata and it's really important that we know as much as we can about the veteran and their story when they're donated to us. So it's a small fraction. There are more veterans than this that are in our collection. But that's the number that we can go with. About 500 of these are fully digitized and available online. And they span every branch, every conflict from World War II to the present, including recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. And every rank. So we have some of the more lauded stories from Tuskegee airmen and Montfort Point Marines. And then veterans who maybe didn't ever leave the state, who just served stateside or who served in more administrative roles. We are again interested in all experiences, and not just combat roles or storming the beach or in the trenches, but all of the roles. So one of the stories that I wanted to show you today, I decided to look at two different collections just to give you a taste of what our collections are all about. The first veteran is James Edward Blakely. He enlisted in the Navy in 1939 and he served as a cook aboard a couple of different ships in the Pacific Theatre. [ Inaudible ] Sorry? [ Inaudible ] Yeah, just like Dorie Miller, exactly. Yeah. And just like Dorie Miller he was stationed at Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. So I thought this was a good collection as we approach Pearl Harbor Day. And John, if you could play that first audio clip. So this is part of this collection. >> About five or six minutes before 8:00, I was on the USS St. Louis. That's what they call box-back cruiser. The word came over the loudspeaker, "All hands man your battle stations. All hands man your battle stations. This is not a drill." That was where hell on earth began. We only had probably 50, 60 men aboard, coming back to their ship. And when I looked around, it was a direct hit, right in the middle of the ship. In December in Hawaii, the world is like summer, and I could see white uniforms blown sky high. They never made it. I don't have to close my eyes to see that. >> Megan Harris: So you can see that Mr. Blakely's story is maybe different than those that we have in the Lomax Collection, or those that Todd talked to you about. But I think you'll agree that that account is equally as important in terms of folk life. Yeah, so that's Mr. Blakely's collection. The next collection that I wanted to show you is actually a video collection from Evelyn Clarisse Martin Johnson. She was in the Women's Army Corps. She enlisted in 1941 and she served in a postal battalion, which was actually the only all African American female unit to serve overseas. She served in France and England during World War II. And John, if you can play that clip, that would be great. She talks about her experiences are overseas. >> What were your emotions over there when you did see them? >> Well, destruction is heartbreaking. To see how the schools, the churches, the entire communities were bombed. Because all that destruction had not yet been cleared up or cleaned up. And we saw that daily, where we were. Because they had bombed Birmingham before we had arrived there. And it was the same in rural France. That was what was sort of helping you to wish you were leaving the area and on your way back to America. >> Did your military experience influence your thinking about war or about the military in general? >> Well you don't forget it. There's no way to forget it. You try not to keep it on your everyday thinking, but you're going to think about it especially when there is so much similarity of that going on later. Like the Vietnam and the Korean War and all the other wars. You don't forget that. >> How did people treat you when they find out that you're a veteran? >> Oh, many of them are surprised. And then when I say World War II, they say, "Where were you?" And then I tell them and they are delighted. They appreciate the fact that I did so. >> Megan Harris: All right, so those are just two of the stories that we have in our collection. They happen to both be from World War II. But like I said, we collect stories from all conflicts, and even between wars. So not just limited to particular conflicts, particular wars. But anyone who served in US uniform can take part in our project. Let's see, all right. So just really quick, a couple of other resources. Like I said, some of our collections are digitized and available on our website. So you can search our website. We have an online database you can search by race, by gender, by service location and unit. So if you have family members or if you want to research the particular history of a unit, you can do that with our online database. We also have online exhibits. It's a series called Experiencing War. And we released those quarterly on a number of different topics and we have right now two different online exhibits that pertain to African American veterans. So you can go to our website to see those. And that's all I have for you right now. But I'd be more than happy to take a couple of questions if there are any. >> Detroit Public Library is celebrating their sesquicentennial, along with the Detroit Police Department. And I wanted to know how would I with assistance through the Library of Congress set up a Sesquicentennial blog where people tell their stories and the stories of their community service in the city of Detroit. >> Megan Harris: That's a great question. And it gets towards -- the question was about working with partner organizations such as the Detroit Public Library to donate oral histories to us and to the library. And we have organizations that donate collections ranging from public libraries to retirement communities, to schools from K-12 and universities. All sorts of organizations. And so I would definitely encourage you to go to the public library and work with the librarians there to start your own project. There's not anything specific that you need to do. We can get information to you and I can have some of my colleagues who work on the programming end of the project work with you. But it's really, if you have the will to start this up in your community, then you can go ahead and do that. Yeah, yeah. Hi. >> So I remember a couple of years ago a student tried to do a project with the regiments where they wrote their stories down. And I know a lot of library systems are trying to do that now and get the veterans to come in. Do you do a partnership or do you have a program where they can come together in a group and record their stories or write their stories so they can submit it to the archives? I'm a veteran myself and I'm one of the last of the wax. So mine was from a reserve point of view but I think it would be really important that all those stories get put in. So if there's a way that we as a group can organize to get the stories in. >> Megan Harris: Yeah, wonderful. And yes, definitely. Even as a reservist, your story is very important and we definitely want it in our archive. And in terms of working with community organizations and with students, we have, like I said, a lot of different programs at schools, whether it's younger students or older students and universities. Generally we need stories to be kind of one-on-one interviews. But that doesn't preclude having larger programs. And I can speak with you after the program about your specific community where you are and see if there are organizations that are already set up doing this. That would be wonderful. Yeah. Any other questions? Okay. >> Elizabeth Peterson: Okay, Let's thank Megan for her presentation. [ Applause ] And we have one more staff member, Guha Shankar is going to come up and talk about the Civil Rights Oral History Project and a couple of others. But we have a few late arrivals. So if you have an empty seat next to you, could you raise your hand? So we have a seat up here. We have a couple right in here. There's one here. There's one in the front row here. And there's a seat over here in the front row. Has everybody got a seat yet? No? Is that a little tight? Actually there are two seats here. Okay, so Guha. Actually, ace you comfortable? Are you? All right. Okay, so Guha Shankar. [ Applause ] >> Guha Shankar: Hi, good morning again. Thank you all for being here. It's a privilege to be here in front of you today. I want to thank my colleagues Todd Harvey and Megan Harris for doing such a nice job of setting up my presentation. I have very little to say, so I'm just going to play some clips for you from two of our most substantial collections that document the African American experience here at the Library of the American Folk Life Center. If you look in your packets, you will see the URLs for the Civil Rights History Project and the National Visionary Leadership Project. And those are the ones that I'm going to talk about mostly in the time I have here. And I look around and I think I see some familiar faces. So I guess maybe we should start by acknowledging that many of you have actually done research here before. Is that correct? Those of you how have visited our reading room, raise your hands please. Excellent. Thank you. Well, we welcome all of you, though not at the same time, to come and visit our reading rooms. [ Laughter ] So make an appointment. Your best friend is the librarian. That's us. I also noticed that with respect to what Megan has just said about the experiences of the service folks here in the library, and some of you have identified yourself, those of you who are veterans of the armed services, please raise your hand. [ Applause ] Thank you. And then the other category of folks I wanted to call out, give a shout out to, were those of you who are involved in the freedom struggle from the 1950's and '60's and on through today. [ Applause ] Thank you. All right, so with regard to that, in your packets you will see as I said, the URL's for the Civil Rights History project from the National Visionary Leadership Project. These resources are available to you online, in your own browser in the comfort of your own home. The Civil Rights History Project, the distinction I will make is that the Civil Rights History Project is available through the website of the Library of Congress, as you can see down here in the corner. And the National Visionary Leadership Project, although the archival materials, the recordings, are here at the library, in point of fact the National Visionary Leadership Project maintains its own website. And you can access stories through their website. Have you folks visited the National Visionary Leadership Project website? Do you know where that is? Well, you'll find out. Okay, all right. So let me begin first with the Civil Rights History Project. I'm the project director here at the library side for this initiative. It's a joint effort between the Library and the Smithsonian's National Museum for African American History and Culture. We operate under the mandate of a public law that was passed in 2009 by US Congress. Under the terms of the mandate, the library and the NMAAHC were directed to first conduct a survey of existing oral history collections with the relevance of the Civil Rights Movement to obtain justice, freedom and equality for African Americans. And then to record new interviews with people who have participated in the struggle, beginning about 2010. The initiative ended about 2014. To that end, we have as you will see here, over 100 distinct interviews with members of the struggle. Ranging from people who were well-known and famous, like the Reverend Joseph Lowery, to others who were frontline activists whose work is perhaps not as well known, but whose stories are compelling nonetheless. And we have over 100 interviews, and some of them, just to reference back to an earlier point, some of them are done with multiple people in one setting. It's a difficult situation to do something like that. I can talk about that a little later when we talk about the technical aspects of conducting your own documentation. So all these materials are available. One of the nice things about the Civil Rights History Project is that every one of these interviews, unlike others that you might find, not just in the library site, but also across the spectrum of oral history collections, they're all fully transcribed. So you can actually come through here and search for them according to locations of where the interviews were done. Or where they're referencing events that were important in the struggle, like say Birmingham or Selma and those other places like St. Augustine Florida, which was a little less known. And we have these materials, as I said, are available on-site. And if you look for instance at the subject listing, it will tell you that these are all the ways in which you can search across the collections and aggregate. Several interviews will come up in one place. So you can search for those individual interviews. And you can also do what is the librarian's best friend now. You can Google it, which has now become a verb. And you can find some of these materials and some of these themes embedded within those transcripts. So I'm going to sort of stop talking now because I think the most important thing I can do is tell you that the words of the elders, the words of the individuals who we interviewed are paramount. And here I'll make a distinction between I think what Todd and Megan were also talking about. We serve at the library the stuff that is the raw. It's up to you to cook it, right? So what we're presenting, and the nice examples that Megan and Todd presented were extracts from a larger corpus of materials. There's 15 hours of material in the Vera Hall interviews. Todd pulled together something that crystalizes what we think is important about that particular collection that speaks to a certain aspect of the experience. We cannot do the research for you, as you well know. And find out what those nuggets of information are. That's what archival research is in a lot of cases: digging down, digging deep. Gold doesn't just wash up on the shore in your pan. You've got to go looking for it. And that means doing all of this work like reading through or looking through over 200 hours of materials from the Civil Rights History Project alone. There are over 300 interviews in the National Visionary Leadership Project. And don't even get us started about the Alan Lomax collection. So it's a lifetime worth of work. I certainly made it my lifetime, because I've been here a long time. So I'm happy here. But you're all welcome to come and participate with that as well. So without further ado I'm going to start with the first interview. And this is with Sam Mahone who was interviewed in Albany, Georgia in 2013. Sam Mahone was a Civil Rights Activist with a student nonviolent coordinating community in America's Georgia College of Art Institute of Atlanta, working several art museums and galleries. In this interview he discusses his experience of racial segregation, discrimination in America's Georgia. And the experiences which were on the heels of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. How many of you have been to the Civil Rights exhibit here in the library? Well, you all must be from out of town. So if you haven't done it, go. Not now, but go after this presentation. Go to that exhibition. It's replete with a lot of just fascinating material, artifacts, objects, transcripts and several oral histories, interviews, not just from our collections but from collections across the breadth of the library. You'd find yourself really well-suited for that. So I want to play this first clip, which is from Sam Mahone. >> I finished high school and then I joined State and began to continue working throughout our reference, but I also worked in other counties, surrounding counties as well. Continued doing voter registration and continued doing a lot of public accommodation and what have you. I remember the night the Civil Rights Bill was passed we decided we were going to test it at a local restaurant. >> This is July '64? >> Exactly. Myself and John Padoe who I believe is here, who was one of the America's state workers. Bob Mince, Adam Wolhouse who recently passed away. And four of the students. We went down to a place called The Hasty House restaurant. And we sat there and we tried to order food, but the waitress never came. One of the guys who was with us said he needed to go to the restroom. And the restroom was outside. You had to go outside and go around the side of the building. Well while we were waiting, the woman came to take our order, but about 10 minutes passed and we realized that he hadn't come back from the restroom. So we finally decided to get up to leave. And as we get up to leave to go out to the car, we were met by a group of whites who had come across the street from a service station with tire irons and baseball bats. And so they waited until we got into the car, which was a convertible car. And then they just rained down on the car with baseball bats and tire irons, beating us on top of our heads. And we finally get the car started and we just get out of there without the guy who had gone to the restroom. Well he shows up about two days later and he says what happened is that when he went to the restroom he was attacked and beaten and he just ran off and never came back. And so that was the first evening we decided to test the laws that Congress had passed. >> Guha Shankar: So that's that moment of deep personal experience. And this is a person operating from 50 year memory. And I think many of you might have similar memories of experiences that just burned so deeply into you that you recount it as though it were yesterday. I'd be interested in finding out how and in what way storytellers craft these kinds of personal experiences into stories for your own use and for sharing more widely with the world outside. The second clip is from Bill Saunders, who was born in New York, New York. Married Henrietta Jenkins and had 10 children. Mr. Saunders attended Southern Business College, Southern Illinois University, vocational education, and the University of Nevada. He worked as a politician and was also the CEO of the committee on Better Racial Assurance Human Services Agency. He was interviewed for this project down in South Carolina. And in this interview he recalls serving the Army during the Korean War. And speaks of his experiences with racism in the national army at that time. And I think those of you who have relatives who you have spoken to, members of our service people, and particularly of that era, will know how deeply those experiences influence their subsequent activism in the freedom struggle. So I want to play this particular clip from Mr. Saunders. >> You confronted more racism in Hawaii than you had encountered on Johns Island or in Charleston even? >> Hawaii and the military even in Korea. The racisms was real, real bad in Korea. And then Hawaii. And I just realized later on, it was right after 1851. They had just really integrated the army. There were four blacks in our company, one Hispanic, one Indian. And I didn't realize until many years later that all of these people, poor white men, who also had a lot of problems. And the only place they could vet any of those problems was on people like me. So they had their own problem reasons and we had a lot of fights. >> Do you remember particular instances? >> Physical fights. A guy will beat me, but my grandmother gave me such a bad temper. I get real mad, I don't give up. So I don't stop when people say to stop. So I end up being the one getting in trouble. But they did so many things to the blacks. We had one guy, one of my best friends who died recently, they made him dig a 6x6x6 hole and they decided to drop a dime in it and then make him close it up. Those were the kinds of things we went through. And a lot of it coming back to me more and more now. I'm having a lot of flashbacks with that. Even in Korea, the war, I mean the guy who was my first sergeant who I didn't know, on the front lines we just fought for two days. And I was going up the hill on top and he said, "Blacks are difficult. I'll blow your brains out." And he had a .45 on me. And I decided at that point -- my rifle was in the hole I was going to roll and get my gun like you saw from a movie. Man, that .45 will blow a hole straight through you. Because I've seen a .45 shoot people. I went back to my hole and stayed there. When it was time for us to leave, he sent for me and said that he had made me lead the whole company out there because being in front you get killed first. So he wanted me killed out in front going out. That was the kind of stuff. So there was a lot of stuff that we can laugh about, because if you don't you cry about it. So but the racism was just really heavy. Coming back, even in California when we got back as heroes, because I got wounded, there in California they started calling out the white soldiers' names and then the called blacks. I never understood that until we got on. But black and white soldiers couldn't ride in the same train coach across America. So we had to ride in separate coaches. >> Guha Shankar: Okay, I'm going to wrap this up because I want to make sure we have some time for questions. The other collections that I might sort of point you to, and my colleague Catherine Kerst will talk about some of these a little later. But again in your packet you will notice a URL for Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers Project. And this is more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and also photographs of former slaves. And these narratives were collected in the 1930's as part of the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration, a federal project, by the way. And assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the Slave Narratives, which is this mammoth 17-volume set. Published and available to you. And the online collect I think might be interesting for you all because it actually has facsimiles of all of the various narratives that have been digitized and put up online so you can scan those. They have some subject terms and so on, but they're not fully transcribed as are the Civil Rights History project. So with that I'm going to bring this to a close and thank you for your patience. I know it's already been a little long. But we'll move on. And if there are any questions I'd be happy to entertain them either here or afterwards. >> In which way are you connected with Story Corps? Because they have been going around, you know collecting stories and I've even joined in telling people about it. >> Guha Shankar: Story Corps is archived here. The materials, the recordings are archived here at the Library of the American Folk Life Center. Again, you can get access to those. It's an enormous volume of stories, so we can't provide online access to all of them. But if you make an appointment with our library staff, with our American Folk Life Center reference staff, you all can come in and listen to those stories. And some of them, as you know, are available in bits and pieces here and there. That's the nuggets that get extracted by NPR for their programs as well. So that's one way to do it. And participation is an interesting one. We can direct you to the Story Corps site and tell you when the mobile trucks and buses show up in your area. And you might want to think about working on a way to get your stories or the individuals whose stories you think are important into that archive. Yes ma'am? >> I wanted to share with NABS that Mary Carter Smith and Victoria Smith were recorded by Story Corps, so they are here with you. >> Guha Shankar: Yes. Thank you very much for your contributions. I appreciate it. >> Elizabeth Peterson: All right. Oh, one more question and then we'll take a break. >> Next year in 2017 will be the 50th anniversary of the Detroit Riot, and I wanted to know would it be possible to set up a Story Corps bus or whatever at that time? >> Guha Shankar: That would be a very good question and we can refer you to the Story Corps folks. They might actually be in partnership with the local organizations in Detroit to do something like that already. I guess that's one of the things I want to mention to you is that we're the national library, but we're not quite the national mafia and we really believe that our local partners are every bit as important with the collecting efforts that you all do. So we would encourage you strongly to contact your local libraries. They are the community centers at their very best and they are places that your stories can be collected. They can help you with documentation efforts. And they can help you find stories and that's really what we say, is that the library is in your backyard and it's one of the greatest resources that we have. And we are always proud to partner with those folks to do precisely the kind of efforts you were talking about. Okay. >> Elizabeth Peterson: Okay, so let's come back at 10:40 and you'll hear more about the collections at the Library of Congress. Thank you. [ Applause ] [ Singing ] [ Applause ] >> VM: So I'm guessing by the amount of cheers that this person is no stranger to y'all's association. So this was a recording of Linda at the National Storytelling Festival, somewhere in the 1970's. And I'm glad that you enjoy that. Good morning. I am Valda Morris and I'm a processing archivist here at the American Folk Life Center. And I want to piggyback off of something that my colleague Guha said about we are archives and we give the raw materials. And it's up to you all to find that gold. And Linda, Ms. Goss was actually here a couple years ago. She had won one of our grants. And she actually was able to research and she was able to enrich our collections even more because she was able to fill in some of the gaps and the questions that I had about the National Storytelling Festival. So that's just you know, another plug for you all to come in and do some research here at our American Folk Life Center. Okay, so I would like to personally welcome all of y'all and every single member of NABS to the Library of Congress to the American Folk Life Center and to DC. I'm really excited here this morning to be able to share some of the wonderful storyteller resources that you have just seen -- that you're about to see from my colleagues and that you're about to see from me. That are actually housed here at the American Folk Life Center. Some of these resources are not just on paper or what we call manuscript materials. But they are sound recordings, they're graphic images, you know, photos and prints and stuff. And moving images. We have also digitized a large amount of these materials and we're working on digitizing another set. And some of these that are not digitized, you can also request and we could do it for you on-demand. Today I will share some of the recordings that are both sound and moving images that are part of story collections here at the American Folk Life Center. The first one is a James Carpenter collection and then the other would be the International Storytelling Collection. The earliest recordings of American Folk Tales that we have in our archives that are actually done on wax cylinder recordings. So just imagine like a candle with a hole in it and they have grooves in there. That's one of the earliest recordings that we have of sound recordings. And these were made in the 1930's by Harvard-trained scholar from Mississippi, a person by the name of James Madison Carpenter. Carpenter was best known for his ballads and songs and he collected a lot of stories in England, Scotland and Wales. However, he was also a teacher at Duke University. And that's where he identified a janitor there by the name of John. And these became important because they were the earliest known field recordings of African American folktales within the United States. I'm going to play you a brief sample of James' wax cylinder recording of John telling the story of Jack and the Devil. So you image that these are some old recordings, so the quality is not going to be that great. But if you listen clearly you will hear when he begins. "Once upon a time there was a boy named Jack." >> Once upon a time there was a boy by the name of Jack. [ Inaudible ] >> VM: All right, I know that wasn't the best, but we have a lot of these recordings in our James Carpenter Collection, just waiting to be discovered by you. Carpenter completed his field recordings and manuscripts. His complete field recordings and manuscripts will be online in 2016 as part of the digital archives. The Full English, hosted by the English Folk and Song Society in London. Okay. The International Story Collection is one of our largest collections that we received here in 2001. It was actually 500,000 items came. And it documents the beginning of the International Storytelling Center and all the different variations that it had. And of course you know it hosts the International Storytelling Festival. And have featured many black storytellers over the ages. Mary Catherine Smith, Linda Goss, Jackie Torrence, Charlotte Bri Alsom, which I think I see her down there. Donna Washington, Bro. Blue, Lyn Cabral, Paul Keems Douglas and that's just to name a few. We have many, many others in the collection. In 2001 we actually digitized the real-to-real sound recordings, which documents the beginnings of the festival, right up to the 1990's. And then we continue to digitize the docs which came, which kind of like took up from that era right up to the 2000's. We know we receive a lot of the storytelling stories on hard drives, so we just upload them directly to our servers. The collection is an open collection. We have a corporate agreement with them, which means we receive their materials every three years for the life of the Center and of the festival. In 2012, in an effort to celebrate the 40th anniversary with the International Storytelling Center, we at the American Folk Life digitized a set of tapes and we put it all together and we produced a piece entitled Echoes from the National Storytelling Festival. So I opened with Linda Goss as you saw, and that was part of this piece. And now I'm going to close with another icon to the storytelling festival. Her name is Jackie Torrence. And I would like to thank you for your patience. And enjoy DC and enjoy the Library of Congress and we're looking forward to serving you more. [ Applause ] >> Now Brer Rabbit was a fine fisherman. All he had to do was go down to the river, drop his pole in and with inside of 10 minutes he'd have 20 fish right up there on the bank. He was a good fisherman. Brer Rabbit had a good friend, his best friend in fact, whose name was Brer Raccoon. But Brer Rabbit called him Brer Coon for short. Brer Coon couldn't fish a toad. He didn't even like fish. What he liked was frogs. Brer Coon would go down to the river with a big tow sack and he'd fill that sack full of frogs and he'd take them home to his wife and his wife would say, "Woohoo! Frogs!" [ Laughter ] Now Brer Coon loved frogs. But the frogs was getting tired of Brer Coon catching them. So they had a big frog meeting. And they said, "We's got to do something about Brer Coon. He's coming down here and catching us. We got to find out where he is and when he's coming." So they decided to put a lookout frog on the bank. They needed a frog with big eyes. A frog that could hear good from a long way. A frog that could see real good, see him coming. They only frog they could see with them qualifications was the bullfrog. So they put him down on the riverbank to watch for Brer Coon. Brer Coon would get a half a mile down to the river and the bullfrog would see him. And the bullfrog would warn all the rest of the frogs. And you could hear him say, "Here he comes." [ Laughter ] "Here he comes." [ Laughter ] "Here he comes." And the little frogs would echo what the bullfrog had said. "Here he comes." [ Laughter ] "Here he comes. Here he comes." Well by the time Brer Coon got to the river, all the frogs had leaped into the water. And there wasn't a frog in sight. And ole Brer Coon couldn't go in the water because he couldn't swim. He'd go home with that empty tow sack and his wife would say, "Is you coming in here without a frog?" [ Laughter ] And Brer Coon would say, "Now wait a minute. I can't catch them frogs. They done got to wild. I've been down there and every time I go down there they say, "Here he comes. Here he comes. Here he comes." [ Laughter ] >> Catherine Kerst: High, I'm Cathy Kerst. I'm a folklorist and archivist in the American Folk Life center. And I'll be talking to you about some of the Zora Neale Hurston materials that we have in our archive and also elsewhere in the Library of Congress. We are thrilled to have you here, really pleased. In 1938, Zora Neale Hurston wrote an essay called Folklore in Music, intended to be published in a work called The Florida Negro. In it she wrote, as Betsy has already said, "Folklore is the boiled down juice of human living. It does not belong to any special time, place nor people. In folklore, as in everything else that people create, the world is a great big old serving platter. And all the places are like eating plates. Whatever is on the plates must come out of the platter, but each plate has a flavor of its own. Because the people take the universal stuff and season it to suit themselves. And this local flavor is what is known as originality." She wrote so beautifully. Known by many as a literary figure, a gifted author, Hurston was also an astute and perceptive ethnographer and interviewer. She studied anthropology at Columbia University in the mid-20's where she was encouraged to travel to her native Florida to gather African American folklore. Which she did. The American Folk Life Center holds a variety of fascinating Hurston materials relating to this research. Our Hurston collections include for the most part audio recordings that she collected from individuals or groups, or were made of her own speaking and singing in Florida and Georgia in 1935. In Haiti in 1936. In Washington, D. C. at the National Folk Festival in 1938. And during her work for the Federal Writers Project in Florida in 1938 and -39. We also have a few letters in our collection. Here is a photo of Hurston which we believe was taken at a recording site in 1935. The photo resides in the prints and photographs division here at the library. It was really hard to decide what audio recordings to play for you since so much of it is so compelling. I've chosen three selections from the late 1930's that feature Hurston speaking and singing and demonstrate her ethnographic eye and documentary style. In April of 1938 Hurston joined the staff of the Florida Federal Writers Project to collect African American folklore in Florida. The Federal Writers Project was part of the Works Progress Administration where authors, historians, artists and folklorists like Hurston were hired to collect folklore, history, oral narratives, songs and more to document the lives of ordinary Americans from many backgrounds. As part of her work, Hurston collected folk speech, work songs, tall tales and lies, narratives about preachers, children's games and much more. I'm focusing today on the recordings where you get a chance to hear Hurston's voice and experience her method of documenting folk culture. These recordings are all on the Library of Congress's website. This is a description of track lining. >> Now when the men are lining, they put the rail down and then of course the captain, he squats straddle of it and looks down it so he can tell when it's lined up in exact line with the others. And he'll say, "Shove it over." And the captain, he'll say, "Send it back." And when they get it exactly in line, he'll tell them, "Join it ahead." But they corrupted that to "Joiner ahead." And all of them said, "Joiner head," for "Join it ahead." And so this song is about lining and the rhythm goes with this. They put this lining bar, this long steel bar, crow bar, between their legs so they have greater push and pull back on it. [ Inaudible ] Their back is to the rail. [ Inaudible ] They're pulling up on the bar. They don't have to look at the rail, because that's the captain's job to see when it's right. >> How do they get it under the rail? >> They just push the flange of this lining bar onto the rail and then pull back on it. >> Do they have to look back at it? >> Catherine Kerst: You can hear Herbert Kelford, one of the other Federal Writers Project workers asking all sorts of questions. So Zora was interested in documenting how things were done sometimes in traditional culture. And the next recording is Shove It Over, which is actually the work song that goes along with the track lining. Sort of like a call and response chant used on the railroad. >> This song is called Shove It Over and it's the lining rhythm pretty generally distributed all over Florida. It was sung to me by Charlie Jones on the railroad construction camp near Lakeland, Florida. >> How long ago? >> I gathered that in '33, 1933. [ Singing ] >> Catherine Kerst: And here is Uncle Bud, which is a social song, a body juke song sung by Hurston. It was collected by Stetson Kennedy who was recording her and whose voice you also hear on this recording. 1939 in Jacksonville. >> Uncle Bud is not a works song. It's a sort of social song for amusement and it's so widely distributed. It's growing all the time by incremental repetition. And it is known all over the south. No matter where you go, you can find versions of Uncle Bud. And it's a favorite song and the men get to working in every kind of way. And they just yell down to Uncle Bud. And nobody in particular leads it. Everybody puts in his verse when he gets ready. And Uncle Bud goes and goes and goes. >> Wow. Was it sung before the respectable ladies? >> Never. It's one of those juke songs. Any woman that they sing Uncle Bud in front of is a juke woman. >> I thought you heard it from them. >> Yes, I heard it from them. [Singing] Uncle Bud's a man, a man like this. He can't get a woman, got to use his fists. Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud. Oh go to town, got to hurry back, Uncle Bud's got something I sure do like. Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud. Oh, little cat, big cat, little bitty kitten, gonna work that tale, but they don't stop shitting. Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud. Uncle Bud got caught knee jerking, Uncle Bud's got gout that sure needs working. Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud. >> Catherine Kerst: You can hear the rest of it online. [ Laughter ] So I have a few photographs from the prints and photographs division. These are from Hurston's 1935 research with Edenville, Florida children documenting their games and songs. With the field research done by Hurston and the researchers in the 1930's during the New Deal Era, the lives, music, speech, memories and artistic efforts of ordinary Americans were documented. The Library of Congress holds a huge amount of New Deal materials. And in the American Folk Life Center we were honored to also house a wealth of this material including these and other stunning examples of Hurston's voice, vitality, with and deep cultural understanding. The Hurston recordings I played for you, plus many more, are accessible online at the library's website. And on the handout in your packet you will find a finding aid to Zora Neale Hurston materials throughout the library. Manuscript division, prints and photographs and so on. I recommend that you explore them. And now I want to talk very briefly about Voices from the Days of Slavery: Former Slaves Tell their Stories. So if you go to the American Folk Life Center homepage and look at all of the online collections, there are quite a few. There is Voices from the Days of Slavery. And I just urge you to take a look at this site. The site includes seven hours of recorded interviews that took place between 1932 and 1975 in nine southern states. On these recordings, 23 persons were interviewed born between 1823 and the early 1860's. In the interviews they discuss how they felt about slavery, about slaveholders, the coercion of slaves, their families and about freedom. The variety of topics, personal experiences and feelings that are conveyed are incredibly moving and quite remarkable. Being able to actually able to hear their voices and all. Included in the collection is an interview that Hurston took part in with Wallace Porterman in 1935 in Georgia. This whole collection of audio recordings is available here on this site. And it includes transcriptions of the narratives to help in understanding dialect and understanding some of the older recordings that are a little scratchy. Anyway, thank you. Thank you so much for coming. It's a pleasure having you here. And we urge you to come and visit us. There's a lot to explore. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] >> Guha Shankar: Hello again. Right, this is going to be the high-speed version of how to conduct audio documentation, or cultural documentation. Before we do that, I wanted to make a couple of announcements. First of all I want to thank a couple of people who have not been acknowledged so far. Frist and foremost or events production coordinator, Thea Austin who has put this program together for you. There she is right there. [ Applause ] And Dana Bell who is in the back, who put together the wonderful list of resources for you. [ Applause ] And many others too numerous to name at this particular point. By rights, this next session, which I'm going to do at top speed in about 15 minutes, leaving some time for questions, is generally the focus on various training programs that we conduct at the library through various institutional partners across the country to orient people like yourselves who wish to do cultural documentation in your communities for various purposes. Whether it's for podcasts, whether it's for collecting stories of elders and community members, class projects and so on. And the things that we often get asked go along the lines of, "How do I do it? What equipment do I use? And how do I do interviews?" I'm going to concentrate on those three things because it's a topic which as I said, covers about three weeks in duration when we teach our annual field schools. This is not for the faint-hearted. How many of you have done collecting oral history interviews yourselves? Well, you know, I should get you all to come up here and do this. [ Laughter ] But I think they will tell you that be prepared, be careful and be cautious about what you are embarking on. It's not a project for the faint of heart. Our colleague Todd Harvey, very generously said that he would take the documentation that you're going to collect. I will caution you that while we are welcoming of collections, we also are acutely aware, given where we stand in terms of trying to archive and sustain these materials, and sustainability is a keyword for us. When we say sustain we mean not just to have these stories accessible the day after you record them and so on, but generations down the line. The recordings that you have here from the Lomax's, from the Civil Rights History Project, from the Federal Writers Project and so on, have stood the test of time. Because there is a body of people and there's an entire institution devoted to making sure that these materials are available and accessible to you. I do not believe, unless you are really well-funded trust fund hippies, that you've got that kind of manpower and resources at your disposal. That's where the library and other institutions in your community come into play. But even then, even with all of our interests in maintaining and preserving our collections, there are certain things that we would ask that you do in terms of making sure that your materials are going to be available and accessible over the course of time. One of the things that we ask in the first place is understand what the parameters of your project are. To take inventory of the resources that you have so that you can then embark upon a project of cultural documentation and interviewing very carefully. One of the things I will show you here is on our website. This particular thing is called the cultural documentation, methods and techniques, on that site. And within the site we have provided some basic guidelines and best practices documents that you may wish to consult. There are many of these around the country. Many institutions like Baylor's Oral History Association have similar sets of guidelines. The Smithsonian Institution's Folk Life programs, the Center for Folk Life and Heritage Research have their own set of rubrics and best practices. We generally bring these materials together from our colleagues across these institutions because we've been at it for a long time and our roles as ethnographers, as folklorists, as anthropologists, as ethnomusicologists, and we always lean upon our colleagues to keep us abreast of best practices. So one of the things I would urge you to do is when you get to the site and you're interested in trying to figure out what the parameters of such projects are is to go to this link here you'll see, called cultural documentation guidelines. And within that you have various aspects of what the broad categories are that one needs to think about when engaging in projects of cultural documentation. Some of these are more relevant to you than others. I'm not planning on going through all of them. But one of the very first things we suggest is that you actually do a project plan, all right? And what we're asking you to do again is take an inventory of the resources that you have. If you don't already have equipment, if you don't already have a place to have these materials rest, then you're going to have to think about it at the head end. Many project runs afoul of one very basic thing. Nobody thought through what the end result was going to be and where it was going to live. People come to these projects and they say, "We're going to document this particular community member or these particular community members because there's an urgency." You get halfway through the project and you find that you don't know where to store them. You find that you don't have an idea of what sorts of topics you might want to embark upon. You have a broad idea, but the specific historical facts are not available to you. You find out that your technical needs are inadequate to the subject matter at hand. So there's a very simple spreadsheet that our colleagues Paula Johnson at the Smithsonian Institution, she's a curator there and a folklorist, and our own David Taylor who used to work with us here at the Library of Congress, have put together several years ago. And I've modified this over the course of time. But it asks you to take account of very basic things like a budget, what are your goals. What other kind of research has been done? Do you have a body of materials to draw upon? Would you need to consult for instance International Storytelling Collection to figure out if the people whom you want to interview have already been interviewed? Or if they've been interviewed, if they've been documented, is there something else in the historical record that needs fleshing out? So thorough research is one of the things that we ask you to do. And then you just precisely ask, where are you going to do the work? Is it a national collecting project like this Civil Rights History Project? Probably not. I mean, you've got to have money for funding and you have to have funding for travel and so on. So maybe it's in your backyard. One of the things we ask you is are you planning on -- what sort of documentation are you going to do? Is it audio recording? In my view that's the best and the simplest method of recording stories. Video recording and videotaping, it looks great, it looks sexy, all hi-def and all of that. If you don't have the expertise to do that, you're going to have to bring some people in who can help you do that documentation. That adds to the resources that you're going to need. That adds to the money, right? You're going to have to get equipment. You're going to have to buy it. You're going to have to rent it. You're going to have to do something with it. Even if you were to work in partnership with a particular institution, you're going to have to understand what their technical limitations are, who they can lend to the project and so on. Are you going to do photography? Those photographs, images, as Cathy and others have shown you are really important to give a face to the voices that you hear online or anywhere else. And all of these materials, all of these kinds of very detailed things that we're asking you to consider are important because they will play a part in how well and how well-sustained your materials are going to be in an archival situation. I do not believe -- I heard a young lady ask a question over here about recording. That the stories that she wants to collect are going to just live in here and the now. Again, I go back to that point earlier: you're trying to make these publicly available and acceptable to generations of people that come after you. You do that through your storytelling. Consider the fact that the materials that you collect, the documentation, the firsthand experiences that you collect, have to live. If they don't live, then they don't enter public memory. They don't enter American historical consciousness. So it's up to you. Because you guys are mediating between the voice of the person whom you're collecting and everybody else in this room and people you don't even know. Right? That's the generational aspect of all of this. So think through all of these questions very carefully. Now let me see if I can -- so the project plan is available online in this particular website. The second thing we get asked is, what equipment do we want to use? The Library of Congress, being a public institution, can neither confirm nor deny that there are better grades of equipment than others, although I could tell you that off-camera somewhere. So we rely again on our colleagues like Doug Boyd, who is the director of the Oral History Association's Oral History in the Digital Age Project. And this to me is one of the great tools. I keep hoping for the day and keep toying with the idea that there might be a similar set of rubrics that we could use for video recording. Video recording is a whole other animal. What we're dealing here with is almost a transparent interaction in terms of audio recording between you as a collector and the person that you're recording. There's not a lot of equipment. There's not a lot of people trailing wires behind them as is the case with video. You don't have to have a video operator. You can with practice get really good at conducting an interview, a story collecting project with just you and the person that you wish to document. And to that end, people say, "What kind of equipment should I get?" And we say, well, here's what you do. You go in here and you go to this particular website. This is the Oral History in the Digital Age site. And right here is this thing called go to ask Doug. And digital expert Doug Boyd, fellow folklorist, oral historian and all around good guy has done this really, really neat thing here. And what he says is, it's very simple. It's radio buttons and checkboxes. If I can do it, you can do it. And basically says things like it goes back to your project planning. How much money do you have to get a recorder? Right? He asks you question like quality. What is it you want to do with this? Is it professional level quality? Are you the person who's facile with technical equipment that you can say, "I want the best and the brightest, the lates"? Then you check this box that says professional quality. But you still want to keep it somewhere in the $500 range. And then Doug very helpfully has told you that he considers this the best in class. This is something that people like Doug can do. That is to say they can actually put their hands on pieces of equipment. And I can guarantee you that you have some assurance that it is what he says it is. What he says it is in the box will actually be what's delivered to you. One of the things that we often say is that you know that people are lying when they tell you to have archival quality CD's and DVD's. There's no such thing. Right? But with this particular project you can understand as Doug says that there are these classes of recorders and every one of them comes with an explanation of what the equipment is, what it does, tells you where to go buy them. All right? Making sense? All right. So that's one of the recommendations that we would have. So mark this down if it's not already in your package, prepared very nicely by Dana. Right? We can come back to this in just a second, all right? Whoops, what happened here? Hang on. Yes, thank you. All right, and let me go back to one more particular aspect of this website. So far we talked about project planning, understanding what you want to do and who you want to do it with and so on. We talk about very basic equipment and now comes what happens when you go to the actual interview situation? And this should be no surprise to those of you who have done cultural documentation, who have done interviews. But one of the things we do is we say these are best practices and guidelines for conducting recorded interviews. And not all of these are going to come up in your particular situation, but check these out. Sort of take them to heart and understand what they are in terms of your own particular documentary situation. We just go through a list of stuff. It's not a template. It's not the Bible. We're not saying you have to follow it from point one to point 20 or whatever. But this enables you to get the story and the voices of people that you're wanting to document in as clear and as concise and as precise a fashion as possible. And above all, one of the things that we say is right here. That I think is probably as germain to you all as anything else. And all it says is you're not just after the facts. You want stories, narratives and explanations, right? You're storytellers yourselves, so you just have to figure out how to mesh the things that you do with the people whom you're talking to. And elicit those stories so that it makes sense for you and for all of us who will hear it later on. Okay. So my 10 minutes are up and I think the buses are about to come. But I will be happy to take some -- yes ma'am. [ Inaudible ] It just says avoid questions -- it's just a guideline. It says avoid questions that can be answered with a yes or a no. You're not just after the fact. You want stories, narratives and explanations. That and many more helpful tips are available on this guide. Thank you very much. Yes, sir? [ Inaudible ] Guha Shankar. You can get ahold of me here at GShankar@LOC.gov. Do you have other questions? >> Do you have business cards? >> I don't have 125 of them, sorry. Yes ma'am? [ Inaudible ] Some of the pictures we have online. Some of them are in the public domain and can be used, but some of them we ask that you figure out the provenance of each collection because they are copyrighted by the donors. And there's also user and performer rights that you want to be aware of. In a lot of cases we ask even if they've been donated to the library that as a courtesy you contact the performer, the person whose image comes up in those photographs and/or their estates. Just as a courtesy. Say, "Can we use this in our own work?" Okay? Anything else? GShankar. First name is Guha, G-u-h-a. @LOC.gov. Or you can just get me through FolkLife@LOC.gov. And all that information is available at our website right at the LOC.gov/folklife. And all of that information is in your packets, by the way. A lot of this information is in your packets, so you're quite welcome to contact us. Thea has final announcements. >> Thea Austin: Yes, so there are -- as your glorious leader here has told you, there are three buses. One group of people is going to be staying behind a little bit, waiting for the last bus. And I urge you to take a look at the Civil Rights History exhibit. That's one floor up, on the second floor. If you're going to be staying here for a little while longer, hang back a little bit and let the people who are going to be exiting the building first go through the door. We have a couple of staff people to help you either take the elevator or take the stairs. There's one exit. And we'll help you get back to the foyer where you got off the bus originally. So thank you again. Let's thank Guha for his presentation. [ Applause ] Valda, Cathy Kerst. All of the staff. Thank you so much for coming. We really enjoyed presenting our collections to you today. And we hope that you'll come back and do research with the American Folk Life center at the library. >> Guha Shankar: Thank you. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at LOC.gov.