Italian-Americans in the West Project Collection contains the sound recordings, photographs, video recordings, fieldnotes, publications, ephemera, and accompanying manuscript materials associated with the American Folklife Center's Italian-Americans in the West project. This project was part of the Center's commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the voyage of Christopher Columbus, which was an element of a larger program on the Quincentenary sponsored by the Library of Congress. The purpose of the three-year field research project was to document aspects of traditional cultural expression of Italian Americans in the western United States.

Field research conducted from 1989 through 1991 was directed by Center folklife staff. During the course of the field research, teams of folklife researchers explored the ways Italian Americans have defined their identity as a cultural group in the past and present. Subject areas studied included public and private aspects of expression, foodways, occupations, festivals, and vernacular architecture. Multiple research sites afforded the opportunity to map cultural intersections of ethnic and regional history. The sites were chosen on the basis of cultural and economic definitions of the West, in communities where Italian Americans have long been associated with the distinctive economies of the regions. Fieldwork took place in the agricultural community of Gilroy, California; the commercial fishing town of San Pedro, California; the steel mill town of Pueblo, Colorado; several small mining and ranching communities in eastern and central Nevada;several mining towns in Carbon County, Utah; and the agricultural region of Walla Walla, Washington.

The field research resulted in a large quantity of multi-format documentation that constitutes the bulk of this collection. Other products from the project include the book, Old Ties, New Attachments: Italian-American Folklife in the West , edited by David A. Taylor and John Alexander Williams (1992), and a traveling exhibition of the same name. The exhibition curator was I. Sheldon Posen, who was assisted by Center staff member Camila Bryce-Laporte and several contractors including Anne Bowman, Victoria Brown, and Robin Fanslow. The exhibit opened at the De Saisset Museum in Santa Clara, California, on October 12, 1992, and the traveled to: The Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada; The Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, Los Angeles, California; The Museums at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, New York; and the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.