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OVERVIEW/HISTORY OF THE COLLECTION
The original collection grew as an offshoot of Stith Thompson's work on his monumental Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (1932-37; rev. 1955-57). This work established Indiana University as a focal point for the comparative study of folklore among international scholars and researchers.
STRENGTHS OF THE COLLECTION
The Folklore Collection is the largest single library collection of its type in North America. Two-thirds of the collection consists of folk literature (including tales, myths, and legends) and manners and customs (including foodways, calendar customs, rituals, and costume). The remaining third of the collection includes works on literary aspects of folklore, folk music and dance, ethnomusicology, folk belief, folk religion, mythology, popular culture, folk art and architecture, folklife, and material culture.
Currently, the Folklore Collection houses materials from all over the world and covers all genres and specializations in the disciplines of folklore and ethnomusicology. The collection contains approximately 50,000 volumes, including 850 serial titles, with 150 current journal subscriptions.
SELECTED HIGHLIGHTS
- A non-circulating Folklore Reference Collection that includes bibliographies, indexes, encyclopedias, and directories covering all dimensions of folklore and ethnomusicology.
- French folklorist Henri Gaidoz's (1842-1932) pamphlet collection consists of 6,500 extracts from 19th- and early 20th-century journals and many published small monographs. The collection offers a fascinating window into the state of folklore at the turn of the 20th century.
- The Roud Folk Song Index contains over 125,000 references to traditional English-language songs in books, journals, recordings, unpublished manuscripts and tape collections, broadsides, chapbooks, and songsters. The Broadside Index contains over 120,000 references to songs published in broadsides, chapbooks, popular songsters, parlor and music hall productions, and selected sheet music.
- The Anansi Folk Tales Collection contains nearly 5,000 handwritten stories, each with a typed transcript, and variants of about 200 trickster tales.
- Since 1989, much of the indexing for the Folklore Volume of the MLA International Bibliography has been done under the auspices of the IU-MLA Cooperative Folklore Bibliography Project.
- Bibliography and Abbreviations for the Motif-Index of Folk Literature: A revised and updated electronic version of the Bibliography and Abbreviations for Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk Literature (1955).
- PDF outline of Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk- Literature.
LOCATION OF THE FOLKLORE COLLECTION
The collection is located on the seventh floor of the Indiana University Bloomington Wells Library (A-Z in the Library of Congress call number system). Microform collections are in Government Information, Microforms and Statistical Services (GIMSS), on the second floor of the Wells Library. Many valuable audio materials are located in the Archives of Traditional Music in Morrison Hall, and ethnographic field collections are to be found in the Folklore Archives. Electronic resources can be accessed from the Libraries' Web pages
For further information or assistance using the collection, please contact the subject librarian for Anthropology:
Moira Smith
Wells Library E760
molsmith@indiana.edu
Last Updated November 5, 2008 |
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