History

UMaine Alert

Posted: April 19, 2024 - 1:32 PM

At approximately 9:24 a.m. on Friday, April 19, a University of Maine graduate student was struck by a university vehicle on Long Road at the University of Maine campus in Orono. The student reports that they are at a local hospital with minor injuries.

Emergency services, including the Orono Fire Department, University Volunteer Ambulance Corps, University of Maine Police Department, Orono Police Department and Penobscot County Sheriff’s Office responded to the scene.

The university vehicle involved in the incident was a Chevrolet Express van. It was being operated by a university employee.

Counseling services and support are available for students, faculty or staff who may have been affected. The Counseling Center can be reached at 207-581-1392 and the Dean of Students Office can be reached at 207-581-1406.

The scene has been cleared and Long Road is now accessible. An investigation is being conducted by the University of Maine Police Department with assistance from the Penobscot County Sheriff’s Office Crash Reconstruction Unit. Any witnesses to the incident are encouraged to contact Lt. Noel Santiago at noel.santiago@maine.edu.

In 1958, Edward “Sandy” Ives founded the Northeast Folklore Society and began publishing Northeast Folklore. As his personal research expanded, and as he began teaching folklore courses, he needed a repository for material that began pouring in both from student fieldwork and from his own. Thus, he founded the Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History.

In the late 1970s, largely through Ives’s experience as a regular panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts’ (NEA) Folk Arts Program, he began to get involved with the new field of public folklore. In 1983 Ives asked for and received a half-time assistant which was became the full-time position of Associate Director in 1988. Ives organized the Maine Folklife Center in 1992, combining the Northeast Folklore Society, the Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History, and public programming into one unit. Beginning in 1996, the Center hired a full time archivist who set up the computer database system and archival procedures that we continue to follow today.

Ives retired in 1999. In 2003, Pauleena MacDougall, who had been the Associate Director since 1995, was appointed Director of the Maine Folklife Center. She retired in 2016 and Kreg Ettenger took over as Director.

In 2010, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress offered to purchase the original collection held by Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History in exchange for enough money to digitize the collection. Funds from that purchase were used to hire the current Archives Manager, Katrina Wynn, who is overseeing the digitization process.