American Folk Art Museum To Digitize Magazine

A $40,000 grant will allow the American Folk Art Museum to digitize the complete archives of Folk Art magazine, which the museum produced from 1971 to 2008. The publication, originally titled Clarion, was known as a source of original research and scholarship on American folk art.

The Museum's executive director, Anne-Imelda Radice, explained in a press release that through digitizing Folk Art, "the museum will be able to share decades of groundbreaking research with current and future generations. In addition to helping the museum fulfill its mission to educate people and provide scholarly findings to the public, this important work reaffirms the museum's leadership role in the field."

The funding for this project comes from three sources, with the bulk coming from the Friends of Heritage Preservation, a Los Angeles organization that donated $17,500, and  a matching gift from museum trustee Karin Fielding and her husband Jonathan Fielding. The museum contributed $5,000. The money will allow the museum to complete the scanning of the 115 issues of the magazine (published on average 3 times a year) and making them available online.

The complete Folk Art archive is expected to be online sometime next year. A box set on CD-ROM of the magazine's run will also be made available for purchase.