The Center for Folklore Studies Archives recommends that ethnographic research materials be donated electronically. * Please follow the instructions articulated below to do so.
For Students
Project Suitability: All projects donated to the archives will be made accessible to the public. If your project has any restrictions with regard to access, please contact the archives director or director of the center to discuss the suitability of your donation. With this in mind, please use appropriate pseudonyms to protect the identities of your interviewees if they ask you to do so. We will not accept projects with incomplete or missing consent forms. We require parental consent if you interview minors (individuals under the age of 18).
Donation Requirements: Along with your research project, we require that you submit the following documents (forms accessible on the Donate to the Folklore Archives page) to the individual Teams folder that the archivist set up for your instructor. Your instructor has created folders for each student labeled according to student Last Name, First Name.
- Archival Database and Collector Consent Form: This form provides an overview of the project including title, collector and informant information as well as key descriptive words and genres. This form also acknowledges your consent to have your folklore project housed in the Center for Folklore Studies Archives and used for research. Keywords: All projects should include a list of keywords that will help researchers and community members search your materials in the future. This can include the following categories:
- Location (county, city, state, country; specific locales, such as Gore Orphanage or Serpent Mound)
- Genre (legend, fairy tale, folk tale, foodways, personal experience narrative, joke, proverb, material culture, etc.)
- Group (racial, ethnic, or national identity; faith community; intentional community, such as online gaming group, etc.)
- Cultural practice and/or calendar custom (wedding, Yom Kippur, Dia de los Muertos, Emancipation Day, pranks, festival, practices to change luck and/or improve fortunes, etc.)
- Belief (alien abductions, fake news, luck/fortune)
- Mode of transmission (written, spoken; material; demonstration; digital, such as memes, Reddit threads, etc.)
- and any other special terms or phrases that are unique to your project.
- Interview Release form(s): This form acknowledges that the interviewee understands your project and agrees to participate. Additionally, it allows the interviewee to give full or partial consent to the archives to house and release their interview materials.
- Analytical paper, link to blog, or other project
- Audio-Visual Media Log
- Photo Log
- Tape Log(s)/Transcripts
- Fieldnotes
Formatting
Save your analytical essay using the format: Last Name, First Name_Project Title as either a Word or PDF document.
Example: Buckeye, Brutus_Football Folklore.doc/.pdf
Save your Archival Database-Collector Consent form using the format: Last Name, First Name_ArchivalDatabase-CollectorConsent as either a Word or PDF document.
Example: Buckeye, Brutus_ArchivalDatabase-CollectorConsent.doc/.pdf
Save your Interview Release Forms using the format: ProjectTitle_Interviewee Last Name, Interviewee First Name_ConsentForm.doc/.pdf
Example: Football Folklore_Hawes, Bess Lomax_ConsentForm.pdf
Save all audio files as .mp3 or .wav files and all video files as .mov or .mp4 files using the following format: Collector Last Name, Collector First Name_ ProjectTitle. Include an Audio-Visual Media Log (available on the bottom of the Donate page on the CFS website) that explains what is on each of the files.
Example: Buckeye, Brutus_Football Folklore.mp3
Example: Buckeye, Brutus_Football Folklore.mp4
If you have multiple recordings or videos, include # of # in parentheses.
Example: Buckeye, Brutus_Football Folklore (1 of 4).mp3
Example: Buckeye, Brutus_Football Folklore (2 of 4).mp3, etc.
Save all images (including screenshots) as .TIFF, .PNG, or .JPEG as: Collector Last Name, Collector First Name_#. Include a Photo Log (available on the bottom of the Donate page on the CFS website) that explains what is shown in each image file.
Example: Buckeye, Brutus_1.jpeg
Example: Buckeye, Brutus_2.jpeg
Save your fieldnotes using the format: Last Name, First Name_Essay Title_fieldnotes
Example: Buckeye, Brutus_Football Folklore_fieldnotes.pdf
Save your Audio-visual Media Log, Photo Log, and/or Tape Log(s) using the following format: Collector Last Name, Collector First Name_Project Title_LogType
Example: Buckeye, Brutus_Football Folklore_Audio-visual-MediaLog.pdf
Example: Buckeye, Brutus_Football Folklore_PhotoLog.pdf
Example: Buckeye, Brutus_Football Folklore_TapeLog.pdf
If you have more than one interviewee and will have more than one tape log, provide the last name of the interviewee in the file name:
Example: Buckeye, Brutus_Football Folklore_TapeLog (Netherton).pdf
Example: Buckeye, Brutus_Football Folklore_TapeLog (Lowbeer).pdf
Upload the following documents to your assigned Teams folder using the file naming guidelines above.
- Collection Database & Collector Consent Form
- Interview Release Form(s)
- Analytical paper, link to blog, or other project
- Audio-visual Media Log
- Photo Log
- Tape Log(s)
- Fieldnotes
Defining terms
- Collector: the individual taking the course and collecting interviews, images, and other information (In the case of your work for class, you are the collector.)
- Interviewee: an individual (or sometimes a member of a group) who is being consulted by the collector about some aspect of folklore
- Folklore Archives: located at 218 Ohio Stadium, the repository for the Student Ethnographic Projects, which have been collected since the 1960s
For Faculty
Electronic Submission: To facilitate accession into the Archives, SEPs should be submitted to Teams. CFS staff will create the folder, share it with you, and be the owner of the folder. The instructor and, as relevant, the Director of the Folklore Archives and/or Graduate Archival Assistant will be co-owners. The instructor will create a subfolder for each student in the course, and students will upload (as outlined on the Instructions for Electronic Submission of Ethnographic Research Materials page) their projects into their respective folders. Students will have upload-only access. Please contact cfs@osu.edu to organize a dedicated Teams folder for your class submission.
Submission of projects to Teams is for archival donations only and should be done by the students. No grades or instructor comments should appear on these materials as they should be ready to be accessioned. This means instructors will, presumably, be asking students to submit to two different places, Teams and Carmen. If instructors choose to have students submit only to Teams, instructors will need to download copies of the items from Teams in order to have copies to grade and comment on.
Keywording Projects: Please make sure that all the student projects are keyworded so as to enable efficient virtual search and access. A failure to do so will only exacerbate an already staggering backlog in material accessions. Keywords should include but not be limited to the following categories: folklore genre, location (city, county, placename), group, unique identifiers. Library of Congress subject headings and the AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus are excellent resources for this purpose. The student submission instructions for Keywording (addressed above and in the Archival Database form instructions) provides some examples.