African Diaspora at the Internet Archive: Spreadsheet (1)

Well, it's Friday (Happy Friday, everybody!), and readers of this blog may remember that during the African folktale weeks of this project, I was sharing a spreadsheet with individual story titles and links to the Internet Archive; you can find out more about the spreadsheet here: African Folktale Spreadsheet. I ended up with over 10,000 individual stories. 

I've now got a spreadsheet up and running for the African Diaspora folktales also; you can find that here: African Diaspora Folktale Spreadsheet. It already has over 2000 items from 28 different books so far. (As you can see, I've focused on indexing some of the big anthologies, which is how I ended up with so many stories from just a few sources indexed so far.)

As I've explained in previous spreadsheet posts, you can search, sort, and filter this public sheet using all the usual Google Sheet features, and you can also make a copy of the sheet if you want to add your own columns, etc. There's an overview sheet where I note the addition of new items (see bottom of the overview sheet for the updates from most recent to oldest), which allows you to copy over new items to your own new sheet if you are taking that approach.

Just like with the African spreadsheet, I have no idea right now just how far this will go, but I'm excited to find out. I think this might be especially useful because some of the most important early work in African American folktales appeared in articles for the Journal of American Folklore, but were not reprinted elsewhere after that. Anyway, I've got lots of Internet Archive items bookmarked and ready to go, and I'll keep providing spreadsheet updates now every Friday about how it is going. :-)

Also, if you have not read it yet, I highly recommend you take a look at Chris Freeland's great piece on Controlled Digital Lending and the publishers who are suing Internet Archive in order to shut this great service down, demanding that they actually destroy the scans of the books which people have generously donated to the Archive. As you can guess, the thought of that breaks my heart... yes, I have all these books on my own bookshelves at home, but my work as a scholar is so much more valuable now that I can share "my" bookshelf with the world thanks to the power of Controlled Digital Lending. Let's hope they win the suit and establish a legal precedent for Controlled Digital Lending that will allow other libraries to carry on this great project too!

Librarian's lament: Digital books are not fireproof

🔥🔥 Turns out there's more than one way to burn a book. In Texas they are banning them. But as librarian @ChrisFreeland explains, corporate publishers are suing the @InternetArchive to destroy 1.4 million digital books. https://t.co/mTW6ZJWP5M

— Internet Archive (@internetarchive) February 10, 2022