Inside JOTPY’s COVID-19 Curatorial Collective

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Editors’ Note: This is the first of three essays about the COVID-19 collaborative archiving project A Journal of the Plague Year: The COVID-19 Archive. The next two essays address teaching with the project and issues in archival silences.

Archivists, historians, and librarians often collect around tragedy. With the increasing ubiquity of digital archiving tools, it has become easier than ever to quickly create the infrastructure for collecting. But archiving doesn’t just happen. It’s an intentional process. Rapid response archiving requires consideration of both the present (collecting/preservation) and future (researching/access). We at A Journal of the Plague Year: The COVID-19 Archive (named after Daniel Defoe’s eighteenth-century account of London’s bubonic plague) would like to lift the hood on our archive and Curatorial Collective and explain what we’ve done so far with the goal of starting conversations other COVID-19 collections and helping future rapid response collections.

Screenshot of the JOTPY homepage. Color scheme is black, red, and white. Menu headings read Share Your Story, Welcome, Browse the Stories, Global Pandemic Map, Calls, Exhibits, and Join Us.

The homepage of JOTPY invites users to contribute a story to the archive.

As we have pointed out elsewhere, most rapid response collections work on geographically and temporally isolated events: the Ebola outbreak, the Victorian bushfires, and the shootings at a Las Vegas concert, the Pulse nightclub, and Virginia Tech, to name a few. COVID-19 is global, with no end in sight. Collecting for coronavirus is both a sprint and a marathon. There is no one-size-fits-all model for how we engage with communities in our own cities or towns, let alone across the globe, though many at institutions around the world are doing so with great care and speed.

Our team is comprised of over 150 archivists, librarians, professors, programmers, and students. Most are volunteers. As practitioners well-versed in the literature surrounding a shared authority, we modeled our leadership around a Curatorial Collective designed to share authority across discipline, geography, and position. This isn’t truly a flat hierarchy. We have Project and Curatorial Leads representing sixteen academic and public history institutions who tend to make the big decisions, but never secretly or in isolation. These groups are not fixed, and anyone is welcome to join. We communicate via Slack, which is where we keep records of curated items (the term we use to refer to the digital contributions such as photographs, news articles, and journal entries that we collect), circulate teaching materials, and collaborate more broadly. We host a weekly Virtual Town Hall to report our activities and troubleshoot any issues. (We archive these, too, whenever someone reminds project creator Mark Tebeau to hit the record button.)

Rapid response collecting is tricky. Thoughtful decision-making, as we explain below, can be compromised by the speed at which decisions need to be made. This is where the strength of the Curatorial Collective lies. Our decisions may not be perfect, but with dozens of reviewers available at any time, we’re getting pretty darn close. What follows is an insider’s view on a few topics that continue to shape and reshape the archive.

Technology

There wasn’t much of a question about whether or not we would use Omeka Classic as our archival management system; it’s free, open source, and easy to learn. JOTPY’s creators at Arizona State University got an account running almost immediately, but the archive quickly outgrew its capacity. We could pay for more storage, but JOTPY’s growth wasn’t just about gigabytes. We also received requests from individuals who wanted to partner with us but needed their own branded iterations to leverage institutional support as well as obtain visibility for promotion and tenure. Switching to Omeka-S, a reprogrammed reboot of Omeka Classic with the ability to nest these institutionally branded and thematic sites met the needs of these partners and at the same time, we increased our storage capacity.

Under the JOTPY umbrella, we now host nine specific versions of JOTPY that include countries or regions (Australia, Canada, Las Américas, the Philippines) and specific U.S. contexts or themes (Greater Boston, Brooklyn, Immigrant Stories, New Orleans, Southwest Stories). Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis also runs an international oral history project. Maintaining these sites is labor intensive. For smaller collection endeavors, we generally recommend using Omeka-S’s geolocation feature and relational database.

After the initial flurry of activity to make the archive functional, we turned our attention to what most large-scale digital projects have the luxury to consider first: our data management plan. Our initial startup costs were covered through generous funding from ASU’s public history endowment, but we are currently applying for more money to cover long-term hosting and maintenance. Additionally, we started discussing the archive’s acquisition by ASU’s university-based repository. Stay tuned.

Subject Headings

Selecting the platform was just the beginning. Managing the archive involved a series of questions and ongoing discussions about how to gather and organize items we collected to ensure easy discoverability by most users. The two metadata categories that most impact an item’s discoverability are subject headings and tags.

At first, we had no idea what material we would receive and made educated guesses at the best subject headings. We have cycled through multiple drafts of the controlled vocabulary we use now. For example, “Education” and “Government” morphed into two education subjects (K-12, Higher Ed) and three government headings (local, state, federal). Some of these distinctions seem obvious now (like separating “Healthcare” from “Health & Wellness”), but it’s not so easy to strike a balance between less-is-more and too much coverage. One perk of Omeka-S is that it lets us create and apply the same controlled subject heading vocabulary over all the nested sites.

Tags

Tags are a common way to add searchable texture to items in the archive. They are, however, difficult to control. The computer reads “mask” differently than “masks,” for example, and thus cannot group tags like “BLM,” “#BLM,” and “Black Lives Matter.” Instead of asking volunteer curators to tightly control the tagging vocabulary (as we do with subject headings), we ask users to tag items. This is called folksonomic tagging. The first Web 2.0 site to use folksonomy was Flickr in 2004, and most Twitter or Instagram-loving people are proficient in using hashtags for audiences, campaigns, communities, events, feelings, humor, and so on. Giving users the freedom to tag items has produced a living archive—one that encourages an active user base to feel a sense of ownership over the content and counterbalances our otherwise top-down archival model.

Ethics

We are collecting potentially sensitive history, and so it should come as no surprise that discussions of ethics dominate our communications, particularly as they relate to oral history. For example, when contributors want anonymity, how do we ensure they remain so? When people tag their geographic data, how do we obfuscate it enough to prevent doxxing (releasing someone’s private information online) or stalking? How long should an embargo last on an oral history? What are the legal implications for underage contributors? The power of the Curatorial Collective is that we approach these questions from different backgrounds, allowing us to resolve many—if not all—of our issues. We look forward to expanding on some of these issues in forthcoming essays.

Working on JOTPY is exhausting but invigorating. The decisions we and others working on other COVID-19 archives make behind the scenes are reshaping the practice of rapid response collecting. But our decision-making is not secret, and our curatorial ranks are not exclusive. We’re facing new challenges every day, and I, for one, will be interested to see how our decisions withstand time, as well as the scrutiny of our colleagues and community of contributors.

~Rebecca S. Wingo is a scholar of the Indigenous and American West, and also the director of public history at the University of Cincinnati. She tweets at @rebeccawingo.

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