Herding Folksongs

Cataloging a large, multi-media collection of traditional song and drama in preparation for online presentation highlights issues of song identity and access in the context of contemporary digitized archives. In the James Madison Carpenter collection a particular folksong sung by a particular individual may exist in multiple manifestations: typed song text, sound recording(s), and/or manuscript music notation. While controlled vocabulary references such as Child and Roud numbers provide a degree of identification, such narrativeand text-centric tools are only partly effective in differentiating folkloric materials. Additional means are needed for identifying and controlling folk materials which are distinguished by other aspects of the song such as melody or non-narrative text. The Carpenter project team’s experience with Encoded Archival Description (EAD) illustrates the value of this platform-independent, widely recognized standard and suggests opportunities for further developments particularly suited to locating and retrieving folk music materials.