Side project! A Filk Archive

A friend of a friend, Harold Stein, was very interested in filk (science fiction folk) music. He recorded filkers at conventions, he collected filk songbooks, he produced CDs. He amassed a large collection of filk recordings, filk songs, and filk-related objects. Harold sadly died in 2018 of cancer.

Our mutual friend, Merav Hoffman, asked me for help describing this collection to make it more accessible to the wider filk community. It’s a large collection–at least 52 boxes of paper, CDs, hard drive. So far, Merav and I have gone through and listed almost all of the paper items, in a Google spreadsheet. I’ve started putting together an EAD2 finding aid, which I’m using as an excuse to set up an Arclight server. (Arclight is a newish archival discover tool based on Blacklight.) So far, half the objects in the spreadsheet are in the EAD2, but the EAD2 is inelegant and needs cleaning up, since it’s mostly made through spaghetti Google Sheets concatenation code and hope.

Please see Merav’s website at http://filk.meravhoffman.com/ for more information.