Folklore Collections

Collecting Goals	General Collections	Special Collections	Other Web Sites
Reference Collections	Government Information	Related Collections	Library Contacts
Electronic Collections	Media Collections	UNC Web Sites	Faculty Library Liaison

Collecting Goals:

The folklore collections support teaching and research at the undergraduate and graduate level in the Curriculum in Folklore and in other departments and programs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They also serve as a resource for the people of the State. Because UNC offers one of the few graduate programs in folklore in the country, the Library's folklore collections are unusually strong and offer a wide variety of resources in many formats.

Reference Collections:

The Library has extensive reference materials to support folklore studies. Access to many of the major abstracting and indexing tools is available online, notably Anthropology Plus, ABELL (Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature) Plus Full Text via Chadwyck-Healey's LiteratureOnline, and MLA International Bibliography Plus Full Text via Chadwyck-Healey's LiteratureOnline. Printed materials are available primarily in the Reference Department of Davis Library. The Reference Department also has a number of CD-ROMs of interest to Folklore, among them, Motif Index of Folk Literature. E-Reference materials are a good place to begin the study of Folklore, while research guides and tutorials facilitate exploration in depth in selected areas. For further information about reference materials or help using them, please consult the Reference staff

Electronic Collections:

The Library provides online access to tens of thousands of retrospective titles that may be important to the study of folklore. They include Early English Books Online (EEBO) and The Eighteenth Century Collection Online (ECCO), which collectively cover 250,000 works published in the British Isles between 1475 and 1800. Early American Imprints I (Evans) and II (Shaw-Shoemaker) contain 75,000 items published in North America between 1639 and 1819. The Literature Online (LION) databases provide access to more than 260,000 fully searchable literary texts, some major reference tools, secondary sources, biographies, bibliographies, and a master index of web sites selected for their quality and range of literary materials. The Library's digitization project, Documenting the American South, which focuses on Southern literature, slave narratives, and first-person narratives, may also contain materials relevant to folklore studies. The Literature Resource Center offers a wealth of critical and biographical information about more than 120,000 authors from the Classical period to the present. It provides several hundred thousand full-text journal articles and other critical essays, thousands of plot summaries and links to authoritative Web sites, over 100,000 author biographies, several thousand author portraits, and the Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature that may be of interest to faculty and students in folklore. Information about electronic journals related to the study of folklore is available on a collected list. However, the best way to find information about individual electronic serials is to enter a title search on the Library's "E-Journal Finder" web page. For further information about reference materials or help using them, please consult the Reference staff. To request a title, please contact the Humanities Bibliographer.

General Collections:

The general collections related to folklore are extensive and contain thousands of books and serials dating from the last part of the nineteenth century to the present time. They are particularly strong in materials about the folklore of the American South and African Americans, the rest of the United States, the British Isles, Germany, and Latin America. They include titles about the folklore (folktales, songs, proverbs, riddles, and other forms of oral tradition) and folklife (architecture, arts and crafts, customs, and beliefs) of varied ethnic, regional, religious, and occupational groups published in English, the major European languages, and Chinese by university and trade presses. A list of current print subscriptions in the discipline is available. For further information or to request a title, please consult the Humanities Bibliographer.

Government Information:

Government publications from the Smithsonian and the American Folklife Center are available in the Documents Section located in the Reference Department of Davis Library. For further information about government publications or help using them, please consult the Documents Staff.

Media Collections:

Audiovisual titles in the Media Resources Center include documentaries on the folklore and folklife of the American South, particularly Appalachia, Southern Folklore, Race Relations, and Slavery. In addition, there are audiotapes of folk music and slides that document folklife, primarily in the South. For further information about this collection, please consult the Media Resources Librarian.

Special Collections:

The Special Collections in Wilson Library have unusually rich primary resources for the study of folklore. The Rare Book Collection contains the Archie Green Collection of fiction and non-fiction dealing with folk and popular culture and works on social movements, particularly labor songbooks and songs of the Industrial Workers of the World or "Wobblies," a workers' movement. The Richard Jente Collection of Proverbs includes some 2,000 books relating to the proverb from its origins to the present day. The Rare Book Collection also houses the Don Yoder Collection of American religious tune books. For further information, please consult the Curator of the Rare Book Collection. The North Carolina Collection holds print, photographic, and artifactual materials illustrating five centuries of North Carolina folklife. For further information, please consult the reference staff of the North Carolina Collection.

The Southern Folklife Collection (SFC), located in the Manuscripts Department, is one of the largest university archives of Southern traditions, especially Southern music, in the country. It includes the Archie Green Occupational Folklife Collection and the John Edwards Memorial Collection of early Southern commercially recorded folk and popular music. Holdings comprise many examples of folksong, popular song, and folklore: string band and old timey music, bluegrass, blues, early country music, religious music, fiddle tunes; interviews with performers; legends and folktales; and interviews with others involved in folk customs, traditional medicine, and crafts . The SFC includes information in almost all media: sheet music and song books, newspaper and magazine clippings, photographs of artists, commercial recordings (78s, 45s, LPs, cassettes, and CDs ), field tapes, video tapes, among other formats. For further information, please contact the Manuscripts Department.

Related Collections:

Related collections in anthropology, English and American literature, geography, history, linguistics, music, and religious studies extend library holdings related to folklore. In terms of cooperation, this library has had primary responsibility for collecting folklore materials in the Research Triangle for decades, so most library materials related to this field will be found at UNC. The Center for Research Libraries supplements this library's holdings with additional microform collections. For further information, please consult the Humanities Bibliographer.