Center for Folklife

The Center for Folklife, History & Cultural Programs is an award-winning program created by the Board of Trustees in 1993, charged with the mission to research and present the cultural traditions of the upper Hudson valley and southern Adirondacks of upstate New York through its research and documentation, special collections and archives, public programs, gallery, and educational services. It has attracted a wide regional audience to the Library for its collections, exhibitions, and cultural events.

The Folklife Center is largely supported by various non-library funds and grants. Folk Arts programs begun in the early 1980s matured in the early 1990s, when the National Endowment for the Arts provided seed money for a permanent “Folklife Center” at the Library that would institutionalize various library activities. Today, it is one of the several regional programs recognized and supported by multi-year funding from New York State Council on the Arts. The New York State Archives has also provided consistent support, and in the 2001 along with the New York State Board of Regents, awarded the Folklife Center the Annual Archives Award for Program Excellence in a Historical Records Repository.

The Folklife Center is a caretaker of the Library archives and special collections. For more than 100 years the library has collected historical collections, beginning with the papers of James Holden, New York State Historian, and growing through the years as a dependable repository for community history.