Acquiring and Cataloging Our Collection

Our collection began with a major and unsolicited (but appreciated!) gift from an anonymous folk music collector of nearly 800 folk music records, the vast majority of which were commercial recordings from before the Great Depression. Taking this as a starting point, we began actively soliciting other folk records with the goal of creating the most comprehensive collection of American Roots music possible. Our focus is on commercial recordings, rather than field recordings. Our collection works with our home library's American Folklore collection to create one of the major destinations for scholars of American folk cultures and traditions.

Given the valuable and rare collection with which we've been entrusted, we understandably funnel most of our budget towards preserving and maintaining our collection, but we do set aside a part of resources towards acquiring new and difficult to find records to continue growing our collection. However, most of our acquisitions come in the form of donations.

Our cataloging follows the Library of Congress' system based on the card catalog system originally created by Works Progress Administration workers in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and fine-tuned by the staff of the Archive of American Song up to the early 1960s. We have modified our catalog to include information about the record labels that originally released the recordings.

Links:

The Max Hunter Collection Folk Song Collection at Missouri State University

The American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress