History and Development of the HRAF Collections

Introduction

The growing concern of students, scholars, and the general public to understand ethnic conflict, cultural diversity, and global problems has generated a demand for educational and research programs emphasizing the worldwide, comparative study of human behavior and society. The development of cross-cultural and area studies requires a large mass of readily available, organized cultural information; conventional sources of such information are widely scattered and often inaccessible, and at any rate expensive to assemble and utilize effectively. The HRAF Collections (in paper, fiche, and now online) are designed to overcome this traditional barrier to research.

The HRAF Collection of Ethnography (the online part is now called eHRAF World Cultures) is a unique source of information on the cultures of the world, and currently contains over one million pages of indexed information on more than 400 different cultural, ethnic, religious, and national groups around the world. The collection was developed by the Human Relations Area Files, Inc. (HRAF), a non-profit research organization. For almost fifty years, HRAF has served the educational community and contributed to an understanding of world cultures by assembling, indexing, and providing access to primary research materials relevant to the social sciences, and by stimulating and facilitating training and research in these fields.

Development of the HRAF Collections began with the belief that valid generalizations about human behavior and culture will emerge from a wealth of knowledge about the ways in which the different peoples of the world live. In 1937 at the Institute of Human Relations, Yale University, under the direction of the Institute's Director, Mark A. May, and Professor George Peter Murdock, a small group of researchers attempted to design a system for classifying or indexing the cultural, behavioral, and background information on a society.

In 1949, the Human Relations Area Files was incorporated in the State of Connecticut, with Harvard University, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Washington, and Yale University as its founding member institutions. These five were joined within the year by the University of Chicago, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Southern California. Today, almost 400 colleges, universities, libraries, museums, and research institutions in the United States and 25 other countries have full or partial access to the Collection of Ethnography.

The HRAF Collection of Ethnography contains mostly primary source materials-mainly published books and articles, but including some unpublished manuscripts and dissertations-on selected cultures or societies representing all major regions of the world. The materials are organized and indexed by a unique method designed for rapid and accurate retrieval of specific data on given cultures and topics. HRAF's system of organization and classification of source material presents information in a manner which significantly increases the usefulness of original source materials. Researchers can use the Collection of Ethnography in three different media: the original paper files, fiche, and online. Until 1958, the HRAF Collection was produced and distributed as paper files: source materials were manually reproduced on 5" x 8" paper slips called File pages, and then indexed by subject OCM category and filed by culture. Wider distribution of the collection was facilitated in 1958 with the development of the HRAF Microfiles Program. Materials from the paper files were processed into microfiche and issued in annual installments to participating institutions; Installment 42 was the last microfiche series issued to members.

In the 1980's, HRAF began developing an electronic publishing program with the intention of distributing the Collection of Ethnography exclusively through electronic means. The Cross-Cultural CDs were the first result of this effort, providing researchers with ten collections on such topics as old age, marriage, religion, and human sexuality, excerpted from HRAF's Sixty Culture Probability Sample Files (PSF). In 1993, the first installment of the full-text HRAF Collection of Ethnography on CD-ROM (eHRAF) was issued to members. The last CD-ROM was issued in 2001 (the CDs are no longer available). An online version was available in 1997 (eHRAF Collection of Ethnography) and was hosted by the Digital Library Production Service at the University of Michigan. On February 1, 2008, HRAF began hosting its own application at ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu.