The Digital Berkeley Folk Music Festival Collection

FAIN: PW-253873-17

Northwestern University (Evanston, IL 60208-0001)
Carolyn Caizzi (Project Director: July 2016 to February 2021)

The Digital Berkeley Folk Music Festival Collection is a project led by Northwestern University Libraries to digitize, describe, and provide free online access to over 36,000 photographs, documents, posters, audio recordings, film footage, and ephemera from the Berkeley Folk Music Festival, 1958-1970, for public and scholarly exploration, examination, and experimentation. A robust and exhaustive resource curated by the festival's founder and director, Barry Olivier, the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Collection provides insight into the 1960s folk music revival, high arts and vernacular culture, music festival operations and culture, workshop pedagogy, and activism. Beyond that, the digitization, description, and publication of this collection opens up possibilities of exploring a wide range of humanities themes in 1960s America: tradition and disruptive technology; performance and archiving of cultural heritage; modernity, commerce, and community; bohemianism; higher education history; and Cold War history and culture.

Associated Products

Berkeley Folk Music Festival Archive (Web Resource)
Title: Berkeley Folk Music Festival Archive
Author: Barry Olivier
Abstract: The Berkeley Folk Music Festival Archive consists of roughly 33,500 items, including photographs of folk artists and groups, posters, flyers, press clippings, correspondence, publicity information, and more about the Festival and the folk music revival as a whole.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://digitalcollections.library.northwestern.edu/collections/18ec4c6b-192a-4ab8-9903-ea0f393c35f7

he Berkeley Folk Music Festival & the Folk Revival on the US West Coast—An Introduction (Exhibition)
Title: he Berkeley Folk Music Festival & the Folk Revival on the US West Coast—An Introduction
Curator: Scott Krafft
Curator: Dr. Michael J. Kramer
Abstract: This resource is a digital exhibit that presents the story of the Berkeley Folk Music Festival, which took place on the campus of the University of California between 1958 and 1970. The Exhibit was curated from the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Archive, a repository of roughly 33,500 artifacts housed at Northwestern University Libraries and now fully digitized through a National Endowment for the Humanities Preservation and Access Grant. Much of the Berkeley Archive has never been seen or heard before publicly.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://sites.northwestern.edu/bfmf/

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