>> Welcome to today's online office
hours from the Library of Congress.
Today, we're going to be exploring
the Occupational Folklore Project
as part of the American Folklife Center.
Just so you know, this event will
be recorded and any questions
or other participant contributions
may be made publicly available
as part of the library's archive.
I'm really glad that you can join
us live today for my recording.
If this is your first time joining
us, welcome, and if not welcome back.
We're really glad that you're here today.
Typically the office hours are meant
to be short and formal sessions.
There is going to be a 20-minute presentation
followed by Q and A and conversation,
and you'll have the opportunity to talk
to each other and our presenter via chat.
So, let's get started using the chat.
If you could just tell us your name, where
you're joining us from and what you teach,
that'll get our conversation started.
And as I mentioned earlier, today's episode is
focused on the Occupational Folklore Project,
and we're joined by Nancy Groce
from the American Folklife Center,
and if you have any questions or comments at
any point, please post them in the chat box.
We'll be posting links as Nancy is
speaking, and we also have ASC back here
that can help answer your
questions as they come up.
And, of course, I'm happy to post questions
to Nancy during the Q and A. But I'm going
to pass things over to our
presenter, Nancy Groce.
Thank you.
>> Great to be here.
Hello, thanks so much.
What I wanted to do is a quick walkthrough
of the Occupational Folklife Project,
and just give you the parameters and
then have a discussion about what we do
and why we think it's such an exciting
opportunity for us to work with teachers
around the country on this project.
So, let me start by just, perhaps, go onto the
next slide, and I'll show you the homepage.
So, the American Folklore Center is a
division of the Library of Congress,
and we're the division that specializes
in oral history and traditional culture,
and we're particularly well known for
our music and narrative collections.
We've been around since 1929
one way or the other,
and we really have an amazing
collection and an amazing staff.
About 10 years ago, we decided that although we
have interviews with people about their jobs,
we've done a lot of collecting of
occupational folklife recently,
and that's what folklore is called.
Oral history is about people talking about
their work biographies, about their jobs,
about how they came to get their jobs,
how they were trained, what they do,
what they feel about their jobs,
how they like them, and so,
the Occupational Folklife Project was
started to send out teams of interviewers
around the United States to talk to contemporary
Americans about their everyday jobs.
And to date, we've been done over
1000 interviews with Americans in, oh,
I would say about 100 to
120 different occupations,
and all these projects are
going up online eventually.
Right now they're only about 320
interviews online and this is a list
of the collections that are available to date.
So, we have interviews with ironworkers
in the Midwest and gold miners in Nevada,
circus performers and workers of the port of
Houston and people who work at racetracks.
Really very, very -- we have interviews with
hairdressers and people who own beauty shops
and home healthcare workers, homeless
shelter workers, funeral service workers,
and electricians, and people who work in
the court of New Bedford, Massachusetts.
We're doing a lot of fishing material.
We're about to put up interviews
with meatpackers in Iowa and people
who own small businesses
in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Actually, if we just go back to the
page before for a minute please?
No, other one.
There. So, if you type in the
occupational, no [inaudible].
Okay, it doesn't matter.
If you type in -- there you go,
occupational folklife project,
if you just type in occupational folklife
project to any browser it will come
up with this page, and you can also get to it
through the American Folklife Center's homepage
on the Library of Congress website, and
I'll show you how to do that in a minute.
But this is an overview of the
collections with some photographs
on top just to tell you a bit about it.
Can we advance to the next
slide, actually two slides?
And [inaudible].
The inspiration to do this project really came
about from the WPA American Life Histories,
which was done between 1936 and 1940 which
was several thousand interviews with Americans
at that time talking about their jobs.
It's not strictly what we're doing now.
We're doing more in depth interviews
and unlike the American life histories
which were written down,
most of ours are either video
or recordings although we also have transcripts.
Let's go the next page please.
So, each interview, when you go to
the Occupational Folklore Project,
each interview will have the name of who's
being interviewed and who interviewed them.
This interview can be found under the interviews
with electricians in Queens, New York,
and we gave a small grant to the Electrical
Workers Union in Queens, New York,
to interview about 30 of their members about
their work lives and what they did every day
on the job and what they liked
about it and didn't like about it.
So, this woman, Kim Spicer, gave a
great interview about how she came in
and there's a special program
for women workers and was trained
and why she loves being an electrician.
But what you have on this page is
the audio, you see there's a line
for audio that people can listen to.
In this case her interview
is about an hour long,
and then we have underneath, the transcript.
It says text transcript log,
and you can download that.
So, if you want to listen with
your students, you can download it.
Just watch, read the transcript or
the log as the interview goes along.
We can also download the actual
audio to the left of the transcript.
Underneath, I don't know if it's possible to
scroll, underneath is a summary of the interview
which will give you an idea without listening
to it and which sub collection it was part in.
In this case it was illuminating history,
and also it will tell you how it
ties in with other interviews.
So, let's go down and take
a look at the transcript
because unfortunately you can't hear
it now, but she's just a very --
Kim is a very engaging speaker, and
you get an idea of what she's like.
And Jamie Lopez was the person who
interviewed her, and there's a back and forth
about her journey to become
a wire woman and things
that have happened to her
on the job and on and on.
It's very good, but it's only one of 340
some odd interviews that are available now,
and eventually all 1000 plus
interviews would be available.
Let's go onto the next slide please.
And we're working through this, and I'm
looking forward to taking your questions,
but I also want to show you that if you
scroll down the first page of the interview,
in addition to summary, if you look underneath
the left-hand side tells you who is involved
in the interview and when it was created,
subject headings that were relevant.
But on the left-hand side, if you go down a
little bit where it says subject all the way
at the bottom and it has a list of subjects.
Each interview is a little bit different but
usually there's a list of any place from 10
to 15 subjects, and those are -- if you click
on any of those it will go to other interviews
within the 340 interviews that are up
now that deal with different topics.
So, if you click on apprenticeship programs,
it'll bring up all the interviews that deal
with apprenticeship programs, and I
think it might be an interesting thing
to have students compare them.
Now this is by and large
adults talking to other adults.
Most of it's a very ready
for primetime interviews.
There are occasionally someone
let a kind of questionable word go
or tell a story that's a little off the mark,
but generally I think it's certainly
perfectly fine for sixth graders and up.
But you might want to listen to interviews
before you use them in your classroom.
So, going on, I wanted to show you the
main page for the American Folklife Center.
So, this is how you can get to not only
be the Occupational Folklife Project,
and by the way the link for the American Folk --
for the Occupational Folklife
Project from this page is if you go
to the left-hand side down in the last box.
So, this special project, it says occupational
folklife project, and that will take you
to the interviews, and it will also take you
to the page I'll take you to in a minute.
On the right-hand side before we go on, I just
wanted to point out that there's also a lot
of lectures and concerts and other resources
that the American Folklife Center has
that you might want to explore when you
have more time because I think a lot
of them would be perfect for classroom use.
Going ahead now, let's go onto the next slide.
The link from the American Folklife
Center's main page will take you
to this page which describes the project.
If you type in occupational folklife
project or you go from this page
to the OFP online collections, you'll get
back to the first page that we were on.
But this page also has a list of interview
questions that we suggest people ask,
and that might be useful if you're thinking
of doing something with your students.
It also has the release forms that we use.
Now because we're sharing
these interviews publicly,
the library is very strict
about getting release forms.
When you're doing a local oral
history project you have some leeway
but you should certainly read the page
about release forms which also talks
about different ethical issues
that might come up.
Just so you know what -- it's the practice
of your training students to do oral history
to give them the introduction to the idea that
you have to not only get someone's permission,
but make sure it's a formal permission
that everybody is comfortable
with the interviews that you do.
Because this is informational but
we don't want anybody embarrassed
or put in an awkward position.
So, please read over the interview
questions and also the release forms.
In fact, you might also, if we go onto
the next slide from either our homepage
or the page we just [inaudible] on, there's
a link that says folklife and fieldwork,
and this is [inaudible] brochure
that my colleagues
at the American Folklife Center put together and
we have a new edition out as of a few years ago.
It's available as a PDF and it's also
available -- we also distribute free copies,
where right now because we're not in
the building, it's a little hard for us,
but after the current emergency is over we'll
be back in the building, and we'll be happy
to mail you copies for your
classroom or for your colleagues.
But you might want to look through it.
It's about, I should know this, but I
think it's about 40 pages long or so,
and it's a very good walkthrough of how to
do oral histories either with your family
or in your community or in your classrooms, and
I think it might be of interest to some of you.
We also have a version available in Spanish.
So, please make use of this.
We're very happy to see it go into
classroom use and [inaudible] ask for copies.
So, I don't want to take up too much time for
the overview because I have a lot to discuss,
but I'd just like to end by thanking you,
and I look forward to answering questions.
But I really do think that the Occupational
Folklife Project is an exciting new project,
but the great thing about oral histories and
especially talking to people about their jobs is
that it's accessible on various educational
levels, and everybody has a formal job
and every community has workers
and people who love to talk
about what they do every day at work.
So, that's my spiel.
Let's try to take some questions or
start with maybe people in the panel.
See if anybody has anything to add.
>> Thanks so much.
Thank you so much, Nancy.
While we wait for any questions to come in, I
just wondered if you could just say a little bit
about your role in this project
and then also your work
at the American Folklife Center in general?
>> Okay. The first --
>> I wondered about your role in this project.
>> Oh, my role in the project.
I was actually the one who helped
design it and now I manage it,
and I oversee the Archie Green Fellowships
that give small grants to researchers
from around the country through competitive
proposals and a competitive application process.
So, we send out teams of researchers, and
I worked closely with them to make sure
that everybody's on the same page and are
collecting materials for the Library of Congress
and that their materials get
to the Library of Congress.
Having said that though, I work with a
wonderful group of colleagues who do a lot
of the archiving and the processing
and assist me in all manner of things.
So, it's really a group effort.
There [inaudible].
You should know this.
And Johnathan, my colleague who's on this
call, can add it, but I think we have 30,
do we have 34 people at the
American Folklife Center now?
And they're split up between archivists,
librarians, reference librarians,
and people like me and John who are in research
and programs that help with acquisitions
and with collecting and answering people's
questions and also do public programming,
lectures, and symposia, and
presentations like this one,
and a terrific concert series
called the Homegrown Concerts,
all of which are available free
online and many of which are, I think,
would be great for classroom use.
>> Nancy, there's a question.
How we decide who to put up on
the site and who's interviewed
for the Occupational Folklife Project?
>> Oh, that's a great question.
What we do is we have open competitions
once a year for Archie Green Fellowships
and these are grants usually in the 12
to $20,000 range to get all historians
and folklorists and sometimes just local
community researchers and unions to go out
and they propose that they will go out and do
so many interviews of the following workers.
And then it's a competitive
process and when the people
who we think are proposing interesting projects
and also have some history or a willing to work
with oral historians to get
a better understanding of how
to do good, full-length interviews.
And [inaudible] we're usually
doing about an hour
to two hours max, and most of them are audio.
Some of them are video.
And I should say that one of them which will be
going up shortly are interviews with teachers
in Wisconsin because we were aware that our
archive had no interviews with teachers,
so we thought this needed to be corrected.
So, we often go into our archive
and say who isn't well represented
in the interviews we've had in the past?
And they make Archie Green
Fellow awards based on that.
And do I have a favorite interviews?
They really vary, and I should
say that we're also in the midst
of putting together short podcasts
based on some of the interviews called,
and these American worker podcast will be
available in the not too distant future.
So, that allows me to go back and listen to a
lot of them, but a lot of them are wonderful.
Interviewing teachers who
just started teaching online.
They could be, and in fact, we're talking
about doing more distance interviewing.
>> We got another question
here from [inaudible],
and she says I know -- do you see her question?
[ Inaudible comment ]
.
>> [Inaudible] sitting on [inaudible]
when I worked on a grant project.
Do you think there's a bit of a learning
curve in starting to use these [inaudible]?
>> Yes, and that's why I'd recommend that
a brochure that we give out on folklife
and fieldwork which offers a lot
of pointers on interviewing people
and how to document and record your interviews.
Doing oral histories, interviewing people is
not rocket science, but there is an art to it,
and personally I don't see it as a conversation.
I see it as my taking someone else's time
who has been gracious enough to make time
in their schedules to talk about
themselves and their expertise.
So, it's not a general conversation
in the usual sense.
It is a bit directed and we
could talk a bit more about that
at some future online [inaudible].
But it's, again, start with
folklife and fieldwork
and then I think it's a good
way to go from there.
Oh, and thanks John, I just put
up the homegrown concert link.
>> I had a question for [inaudible].
[Inaudible] interviewed [inaudible] and I
wondered if there are geographical regions
or states that need more representation and
[inaudible] gaps [inaudible] in that way?
>> That's a good question.
You know the largest gap was that, and this
had to do with the history of the discipline
of folklore because very early on a lot of the
folklorists who were going out and collecting
and the world historians who were going on
and collecting were interviewing the
professions that also had music traditions.
And also a lot that was sort of
romanticized male heavy professions.
So, we have an awful lot of interviews with
cowboys and with loggers and with miners
and with sailors and have I mentioned cowboys?
We have a lot of things, but a lot of the more
women centered professions have not been well
represented, which is why we've been
prioritizing people who are doing interviews
with home healthcare workers and nurses and
teachers and other positions that people --
it's been some white collar professions that
people just didn't have a chance to talk about,
and almost everybody has
a couple of work stories.
And almost every profession has
something interesting about it.
For your days, this is a great way
to either supplement career days
or to give student structure for
interviewing people about career days.
I'm not sure I answered your question.
>> Do you have any favorite interviews?
Yes, so Leanne is asking if you have
any favorite interviews that you think
that students specifically would enjoy?
>> Well, early on, one of the Archie
Green Fellowships went to a --
two researchers in Oklahoma who interviewed
people who worked for family circuses,
and there were a number of family circuses that
[inaudible] over [inaudible] the town of Yukon,
Oklahoma, and they interviewed about 20
circus workers, and that's just great fun
because you get to hear elephant
trainers talk about elephants.
And you get to hear about people who worked in
the Big Top and clowns, and I think especially
since animals are involved, it's something
that especially younger students
I think might find fascinating.
So, I'd recommend that with under the
Big Top is the name of that project.
But the ones for the racetrack up and
down the people who work in the back
of racetracks are also very interesting.
And then one that just [inaudible] recently
which is the workers in the port of New Bedford,
Massachusetts, is interesting because there
are lots of trades that you don't think of.
It's really very varied.
Everything from the fellow
who drives the oil tankers,
[inaudible] the fishing trawlers
before you go out.
The people who are painters and upholsterers or
fixed electronic gear or mixed [inaudible] bags.
Really a wide variety of trades that you don't
think about every day but that are unique
to the fishing trades of
New Bedford, Massachusetts,
which is as some of you might know, the
largest working cohort on the fishing port.
So, on the east coast of the United States.
We do try to geographic distribution.
I think we have interviews
from almost every state now.
I don't think we have Alaska yet, but not all
them are up and available on the online portal.
They eventually will be,
but we're working on that.
>> Thank you, [inaudible].
Yes, I'm also curious.
So, Sarah had a question and she [inaudible]
how you got into this sort of work?
>> Oh, that's a long story, but I
started out to be a classical musician,
and I got very interested in folk music, and
I went into a field called ethnomusicology.
We did kind of [inaudible] folklore
and then I realized I was also
interested in oral histories.
I was interested in a lot of customs and
physical objects that people make and stories.
I just really [inaudible] stories, and I realize
that rather that if I went into folklore,
I can expand what I did as a ethnomusicologist.
So, it's been really interesting, but folklore
is like ethnomusicologist look for patterns
in culture, and I think that's
really what interests me
and how those [inaudible] communities, and
it's tied in for me a lot with history.
So, I think it's a great topic and there's
just so much of what we do as folklorists
that I think is great for classroom use.
Although having said that, there's not
everything about folklore is sweetness and light
and there's some issues and topics that come up
that are occasionally requires some reflection
and with it being handled very
carefully in the classroom setting.
And we're based in Washington.
>> There's another question where
interviews are -- oh, go ahead.
>> I was going to say if anybody
is listening comes to Washington
when travel becomes a little bit easier,
the American Folklife Center is
located in the Jefferson Building.
The library's Thomas Jefferson Building
which is really a magnificent building,
and we'd love to have people
come by and visit us.
And you can access the materials I'm
talking about here at the, not only online,
but in our reading room, and we also have
the veteran's history project as part
of the American Folklife Center, and we
have vast amounts of holdings about folklore
in your state and other topics that are
usually would be good for classroom use.
So, please be in touch with us.
If you're coming to visit or you think there
might be something that we could help you
with when you prepare your lessons.
There's another question.
>> Yes, the other question [inaudible].
>> So far, we'd be very open to
getting awards to do collections there.
So far we haven't, but again
this is an ongoing project.
The occupational folklife
project is still going on.
We're just about to announce a class
of interviews that will take place
over the next year which
will include some states
that we don't have a lot of interviews with.
There will be one going to Missouri
and another one to Oklahoma, and so,
it's something that we don't
have enough material on right now
for occupational folklife although we hope
to enrich what we do have in the near future,
and we do have holdings of other
material on Puerto Rico and also on Guam,
although we don't have nearly enough on Guam.
So, if you're writing in from
Guam, get in touch with us
and we'll enlist you to do something for us.
And we're also very open to just
questions during the year that your --
on our homepage the American
Folklife Center, there is a small box
that says ask a librarian, and
that's taken very seriously.
So, if you write in your questions,
someone will get back to you.
Either one of my colleagues
or I will get back to you.
Like I've got this project or
other projects [inaudible].
>> Thanks for pointing that
out [inaudible] Nancy.
That's definitely a source for teachers
or others who may have questions that come
to them later on or for students
who have questions
about your collections and
how to use or how to --
>> We do. I should say that we just don't
have the staff to help students write papers.
And if a student writes [inaudible] could you
tell me everything you have in your collection?
We'll probably send them to the main catalogue
because we have over five million items
in the American Folklife
Center is holding a load.
We have, I think, over 300,000 hours of
fieldwork, of one-off fieldwork recordings.
So, we, you know, sometimes
we want to be helpful,
but it's just a general question is
just too much for us to work with.
With the ask a librarian
someone will get back to you.
It's taken very seriously by the staff.
Oh yes. My colleague John sent us -- put up a
resource about what we have by geographic areas.
And if you go to that and you
find your state and click on it,
it will give you the collections we
have from your state usually starting
in chronological order from when
we got the first collections
to the most recent collections.
And we're going to give you
a sense of how much we have.
For many states, it's really quite large.
Now unfortunately not everything that we
have in the archives has been digitized.
We're working on that, but
honestly it will be a long,
long time until we get everything digitized,
and there are also some issues about rights
and privacy that doesn't let
us put everything up online.
But we will work with you if there is
something specific that you would like to get,
we will work with you to see how we
can be of assistance to you to get
to the material that you're interested in.
And there's also a set of slides.
>> Great, and thank you [inaudible].
>> Pardon?
>> Nancy, I wondered if a future
folklorists or ethnomusicologists out there,
students who are possibly thinking into
-- speaking of going into this field,
I think particularly at this moment that
might be a thought on some students minds.
So, any advice for the future
generation of folklorists?
>> Future folklorists.
Well, [inaudible] folklorists.
We're always happy to hear from them,
but many states also have a state
folklorist, and you might want to check.
If you're not sure, be in touch
with us, and we'll give you a link.
Very often, state folklorists are
located at your state's art council.
Sometimes at your state humanities council
and occasionally at your state library.
Not all states and territories have
that yet, but a fair number do.
So, we would probably put you in touch with
a local colleague, although we're very happy
to give you guidance on that also.
And then again, to refer
back to folklife fieldwork,
there's some general information
on projects here.
There aren't a huge amount of folklore
programs around the United States,
but there are a fair amount of courses, and
there are some schools around the country
that offer very good programs in
folklore and folklore training.
>> Great. Thank you.
One other question [inaudible] if anyone
has any lingering questions or thoughts
that have been provoked by our presentation,
please feel free to share them in the chat box.
But Cheryl has asked about social media.
So, you mentioned a podcast.
She wondered if [inaudible]?
>> Yes. Actually I'm doing a disservice to my
colleagues here because if you go in addition
to our homepage at, I think John put the
www.loc for Library of Congress .gov/folklife.
Not folklore but folklife is our homepage.
And we have a wonderful series of
podcasts about folklore in general
and also a blog called Folklife Today.
It comes out several times a
week and you sign up for that.
It's free and my colleagues
really do a great job.
We take turns writing for it,
but it's [inaudible] colleague Steve
[inaudible], and he does a wonderful job.
Real variety of types and folklore.
Stephanie Hall is also involved with that
and there's also a Facebook
page that people can get to.
But if you go and put yourself, your name
from the American Folklife Center's homepage
to our RSS feed and to the blog and to
our podcast series, you will receive those
and that will give you kind of a
much better overview than I'm doing
in this brief presentation on the wide
variety of projects that we're involved in.
I should also mention that the American Folklife
Center recently completed a wonderful series
of interviews with civil rights leaders and
that too can be accessed from our homepage
of interviews with civil rights leader.
And there's a lot of educational
materials tied in with that, and John,
I'm probably forgetting something
else but what else should I --
and Dr. Fred is being kind enough
to put up a link [inaudible].
Thank you so much.
Have I forgotten what major resources --
if I've forgotten that would
be great for the classrooms.
>> I think you've hit all the highlights, Nancy.
I just certainly encourage people to explore
the links, get in touch with us via email
or the phone once we are back working
on site, but we do love to work
with educators and students across the board.
>> And what's great about the Occupational
Folklife Project but also about folklore
in general is that it [inaudible]
scale to almost any age group.
I'm not sure if scaled is the right educational
term, but you can find things that are
of interest and that's unique to
your community, or to your school,
or to your state that's applicable
to really any aged student,
and I think that's what's so exciting.
It's an opportunity to do unique and meaningful
research and references in your own community,
and that's what I love about working with
teachers is because very often you all come
up with wonderful material that I from a
national perspective would not have access to.
>> Great. Well, thank you
so much for weighing in
and [inaudible] great overview of the project.
And thank you all so much for being here today
and for your attention and for joining us.
Just so you know, for next week, we'll be
joined by Jenn Reidel and Amara Alexander.
Jenn is our teacher in residence
and Amara is our Einstein fellow,
and they'll be giving us a kind of year
in review reflecting on their time with us
at the Library of Congress and
sharing some of their lessons learned
and materials that they found of great use.
So, I really hope that you'll join us
and thanks so much for joining us today.
>> Oh, my pleasure, and thanks to
everybody for joining us online.
This has been fun.
Thank you.
>> Great. Take care everyone.
>> Bye-bye.
[ Silence ]