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VOICE ONE:
I'm Steve Ember.
VOICE TWO:
And I'm Barbara Klein with EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English. We continue our series of reports about efforts to keep alive some traditional ways of doing things. Today we tell about preserving stories, experiences and beliefs of everyday people.
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VOICE ONE:
In the largest library in the world is a collection of voices. Voices of people telling the stories about important events in their lives. Singing songs they sang as children. Explaining the ceremonies and celebrations of their families and communities. This unusual collection is in the American Folklife Center, which is part of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
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| American Indian dancers Corina Drum and Mary Snowball take part in the Grand Entry at the Omaha Indian Powwow in 1983 |
The Folklife Center was created to collect and preserve the traditional knowledge that is passed on to others by spoken word and custom. The folklife collections include the folklore, cultural activities, traditional arts and personal histories of everyday people from the end of the nineteenth century to the present.
Peggy Bulger is the director of the American Folklife Center. She says the songs people sing, the stories they tell, the things they make are an important part of history. So the Folklife Center contains a historical record of a people told in their own voices, not described by political leaders, professors or writers.
VOICE TWO:
In nineteen seventy-six, the United States Congress passed a law that created the American Folklife Center to preserve and present the history of American folklife. The materials in the Center are available to researchers at the Library of Congress and at the library's Web site. It also provides recordings, live performances, exhibits and publications. And it trains people to do the collecting.
More than four million objects are now in the collections of the American Folklife Center. Most of them are in the biggest and oldest part of the Center, which is the Archive of Folk Culture. It was established at the Library of Congress almost eighty years ago and was known for years as the Archive of American Folk Song.
