Are you interest in the vernacular arts and culture of Maine and the Maritime Provinces?  Then this is the place for you!  Through its over 50 year history, the Maine Folklife Center (MFC) has been the main state repository for folklore and oral history projects.  Our collection covers many fascinating areas of people’s history, identity, and lives in the Maine and the Maritime Provinces.  Interested in logging, lumbering, fishing, or mill work?  We’ve got that.  Interested in traditional food, music, or art?  Got that too.  What about Wabanaki culture?  Got it.  Ditto with information on community histories, legends, women’s experiences, Maine’s multi-ethnic culture, labor history, tourism, hunting, and many others.  In fact, if your ancestors are from Maine, we may even have an interview with them on file.

You can check us out online (here or at our Digitial Commons site), come in and visit us in person, or attend one of our public events like the Folk and Traditional Arts section of the American Folk Festival.  Or do all three!

Digital Commons

We hope you will check out our new publications and exhibits website: Digital Commons.  We’ve migrated the Maine Song and Story Sampler to UMaine’s Digitial Commons website.  Though still available on this website, we think you will enjoy the Maine and Story Sampler on the Digital Commons site even better.  It has an attractive design and is very easy to use.  You can search the sampler with keywords or browse through it by song or story title, artist, or collector.  We are also putting some of Dr. MacDougall’s publications on the Digital Commons site, like her newest article, “Oral History, Working Class Culture, and Local Control: A Case Study from Brewer, Maine.”

DigitalCommons at UMaine provides access to the scholarly, educational, and creative works of the University of Maine community. It is coordinated by Raymond H. Fogler Library and is supported by the Office of the Senior Vice President and Provost, the College of Education and Human Development, the Honors College, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the Division of Lifelong Learning.

We’re being talked about!

The Maine Folklife Center has had a lot written and published about it recently, so we wanted to share the articles with you in case you missed any of them.

Maine Alumni Magazine Winter 2013 (pp. 06)

Maine Archives and Museums Newsletter Vol. 16, No. 1 (pp. 11)

Digital Commons: DC Telegraph February 28, 2013

Pauleena and Katrina were also on “Talk Of The Towns (Community Topics with Ron Beard)” on Friday March 8 on WERU .  If you missed it, you can listen to the broadcast here.

Announcing the Maine Folklife Center’s Maine Ballad Swap & Workshop

The Maine Ballad Swap & Workshop consists of a panel discussion/performance and audience participation of several ballads collected in Maine.  These include both British Ballads such as “Molly Bawn,” and local ballads such as “The Deer Isle Tragedy.” We will discuss ballad collecting in Maine with Pauleena MacDougall (Director of the MFC), literary themes in ballads with Sarah Harlan-Haughey (UMaine English professor and honors preceptor) and how ballads are performed traditionally, how ballads move and change over time with musicians and folk song collectors Julia Lane and Fred Gosbee (members of Castlebay), and Jeff “Smokey” McKeen, member of the Old Grey Goose performing group.

The audience is invited to bring their favorite ballad or collections of family songs. The program is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

The program will take place on three different days in three libraries:

Tuesday, April 2, 2013 time: 6:30-8:30 pm at Belfast Community Library.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013 time: 4:30-6:30 pm at University Club in Fogler Library.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013 time: 6:30-8:30 pm at Rines Auditorium at Portland Public Library.

See the events page for the full announcement.

Library of Congress and the Maine Folklife Center: The Digitization Project

A new collaboration between the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center and the University of Maine will preserve all the original recordings, transcripts and photographs from the Northeast Archives. That collection, the entire holdings of the Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History, is part of UMaine’s Folklife Center.

The library will acquire the entire collection, preserve it at its state-of-the art facilities and serve it online and in person to researchers from around the world.  Copies in digital form will remain accessible at UMaine’s Maine Folklife Center.

Currently, we are over half way done scanning our photograph collection, which we do as TIFF files, and a third of the way through our paper collection (transcripts, index logs, field notes, etc.), which we do as searchable PDFs.  We have sent off shipments of audio to be digitized by George Blood Audio and Video in Philadelphia and are preparing more to be sent down.  We are also working on completing the necessary metadata (data about data) records to make the digital records complete, usable, and sustainable.

We are available to consult with other organizations who are interested in digitizing their collections as well as assist private individuals who want CD/DVD copies of their music or video collections (reel-to-reel, VHS, audio cassette, vinyl) made.

 See some of our songs and stories on Broadcastr!