Processed in April of 2004.
In 1966, the Fife's deposited their extensive fieldwork collections at Utah State University Library.
No restrictions on use, except: not available through interlibrary loan.
It is the responsibility of the researcher to obtain any necessary copyright clearances.
Permission to publish material from the Fife Americana Collection must be obtained from the
The Austin and Alta Fife Fieldwork Collection is comprised of the original fieldwork (acetate discs, reel-to-reel field recordings, and field notes) and slides gathered/taken by the Fife's between the 1940s and late 1970s. Using summer vacations and weekends, the Fifes traveled all over the West, most intensively in their native Utah, with a camping trailer, recording equipment, camera, and stenographic materials to collect the folklife of the American West, including cowboy songs, LDS folklore and slides of vernacular architecture. On their field trips, typically, one of them would interview someone while the other took notes or operated a recording device. They also visited libraries throughout the West, taking notes and making copies of songs and stories housed in regional and archival collections. Austin Fife took the slide images.
The fieldwork collection includes the Fife Mormon collection (LDS folk songs and narratives), the Fife Americana collection (a large body of cowboy and western folk songs and ballads, including collections from N. Howard Thorp, Charles A. Siringo, and Laurence White [called songs in the register], extracts from The Pacific Northwest Farm Quad, extracts from The Edwin Ford Piper Collection, extracts from the Stella M. Hendren Collection, extracts from the John Lomax Papers, and extracts from the Robert W. Gordon Collection and the Robert W. Gordon: Oregon Collection), the Fife Slide Collection of Western U.S. Vernacular Architecture (slides of western American folklife: hay derricks, gravestones, mail box supports, fences, etc.), and their original fieldwork tapes and collected commercial recordings, which are housed in their respective collections.
Alta Fife methodically organized the fieldwork collections, including creating cross-referenced finding aids and metadata cards for each image. In 1966 the Fife's deposited their extensive fieldwork collections at Utah State University Library. In 1972 the library established the Fife Library of Western Folklore (later renamed the Fife Folklore Archives) under the administration of the Special Collections and Archives. A 1993 grant from the National Historical Preservation and Records Commission allowed for the transfer of the Fife Mormon and American fieldwork recordings from acetate discs and reel-to-reel tapes to archival reel-to-reel tapes for long-term storage and cassette tapes for normal research use, thus assuring both the security and accessibility of the Fifes' extensive fieldwork recordings.
Copy two of the Fife's original fieldwork (FMC and FAC, series one) was transferred to Brigham Young University's William A. Wilson Folklore Archives, September 2005.
The Fife Fieldwork Collection consists of 125 reel-to-reel tapes, 184 acetate discs, 48 bound volumes of field transcriptions and research extracts, and over 3,000 annotated slides. As well, the collection includes duplicates of the original field recordings on 192 cassette and archival reel-to-reel tapes.
The Fife Slide Collection of Western U.S. Vernacular Architecture is digitized and all the Fife's metadata has been added into the robust CONTENTdm database. The Fife Slide Collection is part of the Mountain West Digital Library. The collection includes a small number of copyrighted images taken by other photographers. These images are not included in the digital collection. As well, a small number of redundant and poor-quality images were omitted from the digital collection.
Regarding metadata for the Fife Slide Collection, In the inscription field, inscriptions are added exactly as they appear on the marker: no misspelled words nor erroneous place or dates were changed. However, egregious errors were noted in the description field. As well, punctuation was added to the inscription to facilitate easier reading. For information that cannot be easily read from the image, and is therefore in question (especially with grave marker images), we've added a bracketed question mark [?]. Modified metadata is noted on the original metadata cards. Note: the subject terms the Fife's used, such as grave marker, was included in the metadata record as well as the LOC subject/genre terms (such as tombstone, sepulchral monument). Great care was taken with this collection by the metadata cataloguer to add subject, genre, and motif terms for easier online searching.
The Fife slides were scanned on an EverSmart Jazz CreoScitex scanner. The online images are in JPG format. An archival digital image for each slide was created at 2540 dpi. Metadata for each online image includes the size for each slide. Color space is RGB. At digitization, if necessary, each slide was cleaned, lightened, darkened, or enhanced in order to better display the images. The original slide was not altered or damaged in this process. The original slides are housed in the Fife Folklore Archives in USU's Special Collections and Archives.
Fife Mormon collection
Austin Fife photograph collection
Austin E. and Alta S. Fife papers
To view a more detailed inventory, please see