This project started with a basic idea - identify, recognize and honor the names and lives of the African American individuals and families whose work contributed to the growth and maintenance of White Hall and Madison County, Kentucky. Owned by Green Clay, the largest slaveholder in the state during his lifetime, and later by his son Cassius, known as the state’s greatest champion of emancipation, White Hall is a historic site today owned and operated by Eastern Kentucky University (EKU). By engaging students, faculty and staff from departments across EKU and partnering with the local African American community, hundreds of relevant Clay family documents were transcribed, edited and analyzed to identify enslaved individuals. The role of the archives in this project was to instruct and guide over 300 students in transcribing historical documents and to create the online database. In addition to instruction and outreach, presenters will discuss how digital tools and platforms can be used to build accessible public history resources. This work exhibits how archives can serve as a hub connecting academic programs with public history, community engagement, and digital scholarship. These partnerships expanded the archives’ reach and established it as a space for co-creation, preservation, and dialogue, rather than just for information access.
Speakers Debbie Whalen, Eastern Kentucky University (Session Chair) Jackie Couture, Eastern Kentucky University
Based on their forthcoming book chapter in Navigating Archival Backlogs: Strategies for Success, Philanthropic Studies Archivist Molly LaPorte and Digital Preservation and Digital Collections Archivist Evan Miller will expand on their work from a processing case-study at Indiana University Indianapolis’s Ruth Lilly Special Collections & Archives. The Junior Achievement (JA) Records contains approximately 38 cubic feet of unprocessed photographs, and the presenters aimed to develop an efficient processing workflow while respecting depicted individuals. The JA collection is partially processed but highly used, necessitating intervention for the backlog of accruals to expand access.
Striving to balance the minimum processing and preservation concepts of MPLP alongside the careful attention and empathetic touch of a feminist ethics of care, this session will explore both their successes and failures and provide a practical system other archivists and practitioners can use in their own institutions. From preliminary prep work and documentation gathering to digitization selection and reconciliation with born-digital assets, the presenters hope to share their thoughts along with a streamlined workflow for efficiently reviewing stagnant backlogs while keeping people front of mind.
Speakers Molly LaPorte, Indiana University Indianapolis Evan N. Miller, Indiana University Indianapolis
This session will present practical workflows for processing and preserving new, born-digital collections of challenging proportions from ever-evolving sources to make them meaningfully accessible.
Last year, the University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center received the offer of a donation of 4,500+ videos. They arrived in the form of the university’s primary institutional YouTube Channel. In addition to addressing a number of appraisal questions, the process of accessioning the video collection gave insights into challenges surrounding cloud migrations of this scale, Google Takeout metadata, and file format remediation.
At the University of Minnesota Libraries Archives and Special Collections, recent challenges included collections with a thousand or more optical disks and accessions of files created and stored in Google Drive. While the former was a familiar media format, the number of disks involved made previous workflows unfeasible. In the case of cloud storage, new complications arose based on file size and the number of creators or file owners involved. Both cases required new approaches and new procedures just to ingest.
Presenters will share their solutions and their problem-solving processes. Although both examples are from large academic institutions, they will present lower-cost tools, free tools, professional collaborations, and the methods and advocacy that allowed this work to be completed affordably in-house without the expense of outsourcing the work to external vendors.
Speakers Andrew McDonnell, University of Kentucky (Session Chair) Lara Friedman-Shedlov, University of Minnesota
Do you have digital records in your collections? Are you hoping to start a digital preservation program? Are you looking for some practical advice on how to handle your digital records? Do you have a lot of questions and don’t know where to begin? Come to this forum to join others in a networking session. This will be a casual gathering where you can share challenges and successes, exchange tips and procedures, ask questions, and generate inspiration to take back to your shop.
Facilitators:
Larissa Krayer, Digital Archivist, University of Nebraska Medical Center
Brandon Pieczko, Digital and Special Collections Librarian, Indiana University School of Medicine
This series of lightning talks highlights a selection of projects in archives around Ohio. In "Telling Akron's Black History: A Classroom Approach to Archiving," CJ Jacobs from the University of Akron will present on how students worked with archival materials from Akron’s Black community to understand the lived experiences of marginalized voices in their city. In "17 TB of Photos?! : Getting Started Processing the Digital Photography of Dan Dry," Laura Smith and Aurora Charlow from Ohio University will talk about their approach to processing a challenging digital collection, which involved making decisions to surmount issues of scope, original order, and copyright. In "Resounding Histories: Podcasting for Archival Outreach," Nick Pavlik from Bowling Green State University will present on the potential for narrative podcasting in archival outreach, reflecting on his experience producing the “Archival Encounters” podcast at Bowling Green State University that highlighted how archivists and subject experts can leverage their potential as storytellers to increase archival engagement.
Speakers Aurora Charlow, Ohio University (Session Chair) CJ Jacobs, University of Akron Nick Pavlik, Bowling Green State University Laura Smith, Ohio University
Many institutions hold collections related to incarcerated people, but stewardship of these materials remains an underexamined part of our responsibilities. Sometimes created by prisoners themselves and sometimes created by government agencies or advocacy groups, materials documenting incarcerated people encompass everything from zines and correspondence to oral histories and government records. In this session, academic archivists consider how access policies for these materials change when incarcerated people are placed at the center of stewardship functions.
Derek Potts will discuss how he helps incarcerated individuals access the Anthony Rayson zine collection, which was created by and for people detained in prisons and jails. Jenny Mitchell and Anu Kasarabada will discuss correspondence with prisoners located in the papers of federal judges, with a particular focus on the tensions between protecting the privacy of incarcerated individuals and enabling access to voices that are often invisible in the public sphere. Gideon Goodrich and Alexis Miettinen will discuss processing and determining access to materials documenting both targeted arrests and the general incarceration of queer folks, particularly gay men, in the Equality Michigan records and James W. Toy papers. Finally, Katie Nash will discuss donor relations and access issues related to the LGBT Books to Prisoners collection, an unprocessed collection that contains extensive correspondence with incarcerated people. Drawing on their experiences with acquiring, processing, and providing access to the materials, the presenters will discuss the challenges and opportunities involved in managing collections that document incarcerated people, with a particular focus on issues related to access, privacy concerns, and donor relations.
Speakers Anu Kasarabada, University of Kentucky (Session Chair) Gideon Goodrich, University of Michigan Alexis Miettinen, University of Michigan Jenny Mitchell, Washington and Lee University Katie Nash, University of Wisconsin-Madison Derek Potts, DePaul University
This session will help you identify grant opportunities, despite the changing landscape of federal funding. Speakers will briefly discuss the current state of affairs with federal grants, then delve into other strategies for funding procurement.
Strategies include resources for finding grants at the state and local levels, and how to appeal to organizations that you may not think give grants for archives, but do. Speakers will also discuss the programs and resources they offer, including free grant services from the Lyrasis Grant Coaching Program, as well as other helpful guidance and tips. Additional state-level resources for Midwest institutions will also be shared.
The goal of this session is for you to get the resources you need to confidently pursue grants independently or collectively, with colleagues who can guide you through the grant-getting process.
Speakers Katy Klettlinger, Lyrasis (Session Chair) Tom Clareson, Lyrasis Virginia Dressler, Kent State University Andy Verhoff, Ohio History Connection
