USU brings grave markers and hay derricks to the Internet
Old-timers and those with agrarian backgrounds are in the know, but many people today wonder about the identity of the wooden crane-like structures that dot the Intermountain West.
“Or, perhaps people are curious about the styles of rock houses in Utah or have noticed the creative mailbox supports and decorations that dot the landscape in their neck of the woods and ponder their meaning,” said Randy Williams, Fife Folklore Archives curator at Utah State University. “Well, Utah State University’s latest and greatest digital collection has the answers for these questions.”
The digital collection, the Fife Slide Collection of Western Vernacular Architecture, is now online and can be found at http://digital.lib.usu.edu/Fife/fife.htm.
The collection hosts the work of folklorists Austin and Alta Fife, who spent a lifetime documenting the West with camera and pen. The Fifes’ extensive annotated slide collection documents hay derricks (those wooden crane-like structures), gravemarkers, mailbox supports, stone houses, quilts, barns, Basque celebrations, cairns and much more, Williams said.
In 1966, the Fifes deposited their extensive fieldwork collections at Utah State University’s Special Collections and Archives. Their donation forms the nucleus of the Fife Folklore Archive in Special Collections. Later, that section was named for the Fifes and now hosts more than 32 collections and is one of the premier folklore archives in the country, Williams said.
“The Fifes’ online collection is a great resource to teachers, students and folks interested in how humans have put their imprint on the Western landscape,” said Barre Toelken, emeritus professor of English and history, and former director of USU’s Folklore Program.
“It’s a beautiful marriage of the Fifes’ excellent work and new technology, which they would have loved,” Williams said. “The collection was a dream collection to work on, because the Fifes left wonderful information for each image. I believe they would be very pleased and proud of the digital collection.”
Working in collaboration with Utah State University’s digital library program, the Fife Folklore Archives makes available four decades of work created by the Fife team, making these rich resources available online to researchers far and wide, Williams said.
The collection is accessible in Utah State University Libraries’ Digital Library (http://digital.lib.usu.edu) and is also one of many digital collections featured in the larger Mountain West Digital Library (http://www.lib.utah.edu/digital/mwdl/), a consortium of digital collections from universities, colleges, public libraries, museums and historical societies in Utah.
The Mountain West Digital Library was created by the Utah Academic Library Consortium to digitize and host some of the rich resources owned by regional libraries, museums and historical societies, Williams said. Utah State University’s Digital Library is one of four regional hubs of the MWDL, established to help local institutions digitize and mount collections on a cost-recovery basis.
For more information about the online Fife Collection or Utah State University’s digital program, email at Digital@usu.edu or call Cheryl Walters at (435) 797-2623.