20th Century Southern Folklife Digital Archive

An inter-institutional, collaborative resource for southern life and culture

A multimedia oral history of the American South as documented by William R. Ferris

About the Collection

The rich and varied career of folklorist William R. Ferris spans four decades. As a young man in the 1960s, he began documenting African American traditional arts in his home state of Mississippi. In 1969 at the University of Pennsylvania he completed one of the earliest dissertations on Delta blues music. From the 1970s to the late 1990s Ferris taught at Jackson State University in Mississippi, Yale University and the University of Mississippi. During this time he documented the lives and work of southern artists—men and women, black and white—from musicians to basket makers, and from fiction writers to embroiderers.


History

The Southern Folklife Digital Archive began in several places at once. This digital collection is a result of the effort of several parties interested in the preservation of and access to the materials in William Ferris's personal collection (now a part of the Southern Folklife Archive located in Wilson Library at UNC-Chapel Hill), including the Southern Folklife Archive (SFA), the Office of Arts and Sciences Information Services (OASIS), and the students in Jeffrey Pomerantz's Digital Libraries Class at the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at UNC Chapel Hill.

The materials on the site were digitized in part by the SFA and OASIS. Metadata standards, initial design work, and a development framework for the future were generated by the students in the digital libraries class at SILS. Jesse Wilbur, working as part of OASIS, in concert with the SILS students, constructed a prototype of the site.

For more information, please go to the Project pages.