The documentation team for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival has been honored with the Smithsonian’s 2025 Digital Innovation Award. This award, issued by the institution’s Office of Digital and Innovation, recognizes teams who use creative and innovative thinking to introduce novel digital solutions.

Over the past decade, our team, led by digital projects archivist Cecilia Peterson and audiovisual archivist Dave Walker, has streamlined the processes of managing terabytes of data that document our annual event on the National Mall. This documentation is housed in the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, where it serves as a resource for staff, researchers, and Festival participants and their communities in perpetuity.

In the off-season, Walker and Peterson oversee digitization of analog assets going back to the Festival’s founding in 1967.

“Digitizing the Festival’s analog tapes isn’t only about preservation: it is also about access, equity, and memory,” Walker says. “These recordings capture thousands of voices, music, and stories that might otherwise fade away. By transforming fragile reels and tapes into stable, searchable digital files, we’re ensuring that these cultural expressions remain available to future generations.”

During the Festival, they also oversee the creation of new digital assets—photos, video, and audio recordings—working from a temporary office on the National Mall.

“We witness how culture bearers share space with one another, interact with the public, and choose to represent themselves,” Peterson says. “We work with incredible staff and volunteers to make sure we capture as much as possible. We review every file, processing and preserving what is kept, and commit to memory (and metadata) the names of the people and traditions depicted.”

The team’s goal is to improve workflows each year to make the documentation easier to request and use. Among their accomplishments of the past few years, the team has:

• Digitized thousands of analog audio tapes, including rare field recordings and performances
• Digitized thousands of 35 mm color slides, including program fieldwork
• Supported community access by sharing digitized materials with Festival participants and their communities
• Implemented standardized workflows for ingesting, describing, and preserving over 10 TB of born-digital assets from each year’s Festival
• Developed standard metadata schemas across formats
• Integrated the Smithsonian’s Digital Access Management System as our central repository to ensure long-term preservation and internal access
• Collaborated with interns and volunteers to enhance access through tagging and transcription
• Begun piloting AI-assisted tools for audio transcription

For an ephemeral event like the Folklife Festival, thorough and thoughtful documentation is key to extending its impact and ultimately achieving our mission of cultivating curiosity, understanding, and belonging for all people.

View the finding aid for Smithsonian Folklife Festival records in the Smithsonian Online Virtual Archives. See employment, internship, and volunteer opportunities with the documentation team.