Introduction - editor's explanation of Library Trends' featured articles about collection and documentation of folklore materials in libraries and information networks

Library Trends, Wntr, 1999 by Betsy Hearne

FOLKLORE IS OFTEN ASSOCIATED WITH NINETEENTH-CENTURY peasant cultures during western Europe's transition from oral to print traditions but, in fact, folklore is ongoing and ubiquitous. Every human being belongs simultaneously to varied folk groups--circles of family, religion, work, and play--that sometimes overlap and sometimes do not. A well socialized human learns the lore of each circle and learns not to mix the lore of various circles inappropriately. For the researcher and archivist, folklore breaks down into a challenging array of forms--narrative (stories, songs, jokes, cyberhoaxes, etc.), material (crafts, vernacular buildings, photocopy art), and customary (superstitions, games, dances, herb remedies), among others--that combine to reveal the values and conflicts of a society and its deepest wells of knowledge. This kind of information is no less a part of the landscape for being "underground," i.e., disseminated informally rather than formally. Gary Nabhan (1985), a southwestern ethnobotanist, discovered that collecting and categorizing seeds was just a first step toward exploring environmental science; he needed the stories of how Native Americans used the seeds to understand their medicinal and nutritional value. Science and stories enrich each other. The information we need is often coded and interpretively embedded in folklore.

Library and information science (LIS) has always played a role in folklore because of its emphasis on collection, preservation, organization, and access of information in varied formats. But vernacular information is often as elusive as it is crucial. An enormous amount of information that is communicated informally through verbal, customary, and material lore is lost or loses meaning when taken out of context. How does the field of library and information science deal with this kind of information? Where does folklore fit into theoretical constructs such as Michael Buckland's (1991) "Information as Thing," which seems to extend collections to material lore but does not quite include performance of oral lore? Has the area of children's librarianship pioneered the inclusion of oral lore in action through a century-old commitment to storytelling programs? How do folklore and popular culture qualify as information? How does technology incorporate, affect, mediate, format, and redefine folklore?

In addressing such questions about the nature of knowledge, we see that, not only does LIS play a role in folklore (through traditional areas such as archival preservation of tape and video recordings), but folklore can also play a role in LIS, where so far it has had little impact except in the form of reference tools such as the Tale Type and Motif indexes--the practical use of which, to retrieve information for patrons, does not involve librarians in the exploration and application of folkloristic theory itself. Yet folklorists are experienced in collecting, categorizing, analyzing, and interpreting informal knowledge. While "information systems" might not be a favorite folkloristic term, most folklorists are in fact investigating them.

With this idea in mind, I submitted a proposal in 1996 to the Advanced Studies Committee of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois for a doctoral seminar entitled "Folklore: From Fireplace to Cyberspace." By 1998, when I began to teach the course, the bibliography had grown to a thicket of single-spaced pages, the packet of readings had increased by inches, and a dozen brave students had signed up for the course. On the first day, when each introduced his or her area of specialization, the range of interests crossed disciplinary boundaries of science, social science, and the humanities. Cutting-edge technologists and children's librarians (not a mutually exclusive category, by the way) and others with contrasting backgrounds were hoping to share common ground here. Such is the nature of LIS (and folklore, as well), and such is the challenge of educating library and information scientists of the future. How to create an intellectual community among students and faculty of disparate research bases is an issue that has sundered and even sunk schools of library and information science over two decades.

Fortunately this course did not sink, but neither did it become as tightly knit a community during the semester as it did afterward when the students opted to revise their innovative papers over a six-month period for a Library Trends issue on folkloristic approaches to library and information science. While the class itself had been cordial and stimulating, the long-term joint project added a cohesion lacking in the development of individual term projects with broadly varied, if mutually enlightening, foci. Gathering for food, wine, and stories of trauma or triumph in the course of common work creates traditions. It is not just theories that draw an intellectual community together, but experience as well--as any folklorist could tell us. Folk groups take time to form, but this course did prove that a mutual focus can integrate disciplines effectively enough to create a rich learning environment even within the confines of a classroom semester. Apart from the research value of the contributions, this Library Trends issue demonstrates the challenges of pedagogy among doctoral students in a field that is not only interdisciplinary but also changing at a meteoric pace.