AFS Web Site Feature and User’s Introductory Guide
1. The AFS site offers members a variety of venues for information and interaction:
About the American Folklore Society provides information about AFS and its activities.
The AFS Review, edited by John Laudun of the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, publishes a wide range of materials, including essays, opinion pieces, notes, and queries, as well as all the news once included in the AFS Newsletter.
The Folklore Commons is a wiki-style knowledge base that over time will become a comprehensive information resource about folklore and the field of folklore studies.
The AFS Workspace includes a calendar of conferences and other events; a career center with postings of jobs and other professional opportunities; a place to join the Society or AFS sections, or to make donations to the AFS; a tool to search the AFS member directory; and the AFS online store, for completing payments to AFS for any product or service other than AFS memberships.
The Forums offer public communication opportunities for our members.
2. The structure is in place, but the rest depends on you!
This is largely an interactive web site. You can submit news items and contributions for publication in the AFS Review (which offers stable URLs for citation in your CV). You can post job openings and events in the field to the AFS Workspace’s calendar and career center. You can contribute links, new entries, amplifications, documents (bibliographies, syllabi, proposals) to the Folklore Commons – its value as a knowledge base will grow only to the extent that you and other AFS members contribute to it. As an AFS member, you can engage in public, archived discussions on topics and issues of interest in the Forums. If you are a member of an AFS Section, you and others in your section can use your "Group” space to create a section-members-only website, to share files and images, and to communicate within the section.
3. Anyone can read; only members can write.
Anyone with an Internet connection can browse almost all pages of our site, but to make contributions to, or edit, the site's contents you need to be a member of AFS.
4. Your Profile goes public – or not.
By default, every member has a searchable Profile, viewable to other AFS members, which has two parts: a Wall and a Bio. You determine how much or how little information you want to make publicly available in your Wall and Bio.
Your Wall can contain information on your site activities (past postings, and the like) and your links to other members. If you do not want this information to be shown, you can use "Preferences" in your Profile—reach it by clicking on Manage Profile in the My Profile box that appears on the right-hand side of any site page once you Sign In—to hide your Wall.
Your Bio contains your contact information. Your Bio is also your AFS member record, so you must provide, at minimum, an email address and a mailing address for AFS to use when we, for instance, need to reach you or need to mail you the new issue of the Journal of American Folklore. ,If you want to keep certain Bio information hidden from other members, you can use "Edit Bio” in your Profile—reach it by clicking on Manage Profile in the My Profile box that appears on the right-hand side of any site page once you Sign In—to keep personal data confidential from other members. You Bio can also contain information about your interests in the field, a professional biography, or your CV--as much or as little information as you want to share.
5. Sign In if you want to take advantage of the site’s capabilities.
"Sign In” is for current AFS members. "Join AFS” is for joining AFS for the first time. (The "Sign In” link is on the top gold line of the home page, or any other page you’re on if you haven’t Signed In yet.) We have transferred our data records, so you may use your previous user ID and password to Sign In. If you did not create a user ID and password in the past, but your membership is current, you can sign in with your first initial and last name (e.g., jsmith) as your user ID, and "temporary” as your password. Once signed in, you will be taken to your personal Profile, and you can edit it, access all parts of the site, and post site content.
The site may not recognize former members whose memberships lapsed before 2010. In this case, use the "Join AFS" button. AFS will reunite your new membership record with your former membership details.
If you are a current member, but cannot sign in using the above process, please email Lorraine Cashman at with the user ID and password you want to use for the site. Your password must be alphanumeric (i.e., it must contain both letters and numbers).
6. How to find another member in the Membership Directory:
Sign In to the site and click AFS Workspace on the main menu; then click Membership Directory on the drop-down menu. Enter the last name of the person you're looking for in the Search field. Once the search returns results, hold your cursor over the name of the person you're looking for and a small window will open, where you can click on the person's name to be taken to her or his Profile--the person's contact information will be in her or his Bio.
If you want to find groups of members--for example, all members who live in Illinois, or all members who are part of the Folk Belief and Religious Folklife interest-group section of AFS--just use the Advanced Search option shown in red on the Member Directory Search page.
7. How to contribute content (this information is also on the site itself):
Your member profile: You can edit this information yourself at any time. Start by clicking Manage Profile in the My Profile box that appears on the right-hand side of every site page once you Sign In. You can then change information about yourself, and control what will be readable, in Edit Bio. This website is communications-friendly—perhaps too much so—so its default is for you to receive notification of many changes made to the site by other members. From Manage Profile you can also go to Preferences, where you can control what sorts of notifications you want to receive from the website.
AFS sections: Pages about AFS sections for the public appear in About AFS. Section leaders can add to or edit these pages at any time by clicking the Edit This Page button in the upper right-hand corner of the text area. Be sure to click Submit when you’re done. Sections also have Group space for their own use—for section-member-only information and communications, for example – which group members can access from their own Profiles, in My Groups. Any section member can post content to these pages.
AFS Review contributions: Submit your essays, opinion pieces, notes, queries, and news items by clicking the Add New Post button on the AFS review page. Review editor John Laudun () will review them before adding them to the site.
Submitting events for the Calendar: Email information to Tim Lloyd ().
Job postings: You can post these directly to the Career Center in the AFS Workspace.
Adding or editing Folklore Commons content: To add a new page, email the page title and text in .doc format, including any hyperlinks and notes about placement, to Tim Lloyd (). To contribute to or edit an existing page, click the Edit This Page button in the upper right-hand corner of the text area. Be sure to click Submit when you’re done.
Starting or contributing to a Forum: We have created 14 initial forums on a variety of areas of interest, and posted an initial forum topic to the Professional Practice forum. To create a new forum, please email its name and a sentence or two of description to Tim Lloyd (). To start a new topic in an existing forum, just click on the forum name. To contribute to an existing topic, click on its name. Click on the Subscribe or RSS icons to stay connected to a particular forum or topic.
8. How to renew your AFS membership securely online:
All AFS members will receive renewal notices—once by US mail, then via email—as their membership expiration dates approach. Email notifications will contain a link to the online member renewal process. You also can renew your AFS membership at any time; there is a link to renewal in the AFS Workspace. If your membership lapses before you renew, use "Sign In”; it will provide a link to renew your membership before you will be able to access your Profile.
9. How to make all other financial transactions securely online:
AFS section memberships (including renewals), Fellows dues payments, JSTOR access, sponsorships of international members, and eventually, annual meeting registration fee payments – are managed in the Online Store in the AFS Workspace. Therefore, for AFS members with any of these add-ons, renewal is a two-step process. First, complete the renewal or registration transaction, including a credit card payment, and then continue to the Online Store to renew section memberships or any of these other add-ons, and to pay for them via a second credit card transaction.