Kate Hennessy presents at the Library of Congress, Washington DC

Kate Hennessy is an invited panelist at the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Centre’s event Documenting Culture in the 21st Century, June 4th, 2015.

From the symposium website, “Documenting and archiving traditional culture today involves working with technologies, methodologies, ethical challenges, and creative possibilities that were undreamed of when Alan Lomax and other early collectors went into the field. Those earlier generations used recording equipment and theoretical approaches that were state-of-the-art at the time, but a lot has changed. This symposium presents a sampler of innovative contemporary approaches to fieldwork. Some of them are directly related to more traditional methods of ethnographic documentation, archiving, and presentation, while others are a little further afield. Speakers will consider how evolving approaches to ethics, social justice, ownership rights, and privacy are affecting the acquisition, stewardship, and sharing of materials at repositories like the Library of Congress. They will also explore how such approaches are creating other, newer opportunities for archiving and sharing cultural resources”.