PROPOSAL TYPE
Individual
SEEKING
- Seeking General Feedback and Interest
- Seeking Additional Presenters
RELATED TOPICS
- Archives
- Digital
- Teaching and Training
ABSTRACT
Digital collections are not new. However, archives are rethinking the creation of digital collections—including subjects, workflows, and workforce—after disruptions to in-person learning during the COVID-19 pandemic affected engagement with physical materials and increased interest in the history of minority groups in local communities following the Black Lives Matter movement. This presentation will discuss current digital-collection initiatives at a small Indiana liberal arts college, including digitizing 1980s oral histories from Black campus and community members, collaborating with Malcolm X Institute of Black Studies students to digitize their organizational materials for research, and promoting DEI archival materials in classes.
DESCRIPTION
My primary goal is to communicate current initiatives in the archives at Wabash College in order to share lessons learned, successes achieved, and new ideas related to digital collections. By communicating this work, I aim to elicit discussion to compare experiences when building digital collections, collaborating with partners on projects, and determining workflows.
I will achieve this goal with three main examples: 1. The digitization of, metadata creation for, and revision of the Wabash College Black Oral History Project Collection; 2. Collaboration with Malcolm X Institute of Black Studies students to digitize organizational materials, including organization, documentation, and workflows; and 3. Working with courses on researching DEI-related topics in the archives, including course preparation, student engagement with archival materials in-person and online, and impact on digital collection priorities.
For context, I will address the special focus of my position. My position as Digital Archivist does have traditional archival responsibilities in the archives at Wabash College. In addition, my position is funded by funded through the College’s Restoring Hope, Restoring Trust project (RHRT) sponsored by the Lilly Endowment’s Chartering the Future for Indiana’s Colleges and Universities grant program. RHRT aims to increase the recruitment, retention, and graduation rate of students from minority populations and diversify the College’s curriculum and curricular resources. My position supports the curricular side of the grant, working to increase the research of DEI-related topics in the archives, creating resources to increase this research, and promoting these resources and research on campus. One specific project my position is tasked with is promoting the research of Black cultural sites in Indiana in collaboration with an English and Black studies faculty member.
While my submission is an individual presentation, I am willing—and excited—to join a roundtable or traditional panel proposal on digital collections or digital archives. The proposal could specifically focus on DEI topics or be more general. This could include building digital collections for academic research or community use, collecting and digitizing materials, and managing large digital projects.
As I have never attended the NCPH Annual Meeting, I seek feedback on the proposal as a whole and connections to potential collaborators and presenters to expand this proposal.
If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to pass along someone’s contact information confidentially, please get in contact directly: Evan Miller, Wabash College, [email protected]
ALL FEEDBACK AND OFFERS OF ASSISTANCE SHOULD BE SUBMITTED BY JULY 7, 2023. If you have general ideas or feedback to share, please feel free to use the comments feature below.
Your presentation sounds incredibly interesting and multi-faceted. I think you have lots of areas that could become the focus of your presentation. The people who attend NCPH is pretty varied, so you could get feedback from the archival/digital collections side or instructional side. As an instructor, I’m most interested in #3 because of the student engagement aspect and course integration of DEI-related archival materials. You could invite a colleague who worked with you and could speak of the impact on students and courses. Good luck shaping your proposal and hope to see it in Salt Lake.
I would like to hear more from the Malcolm X Institute’s students and their experience working on this project. I believe the audience will come to a session like this seeking concrete, discrete actions they can take. However, the thing they won’t realize they were looking for is the emotional impact the experience may have had on those students. It would inform a lot of people’s approach to their own program design.
I agree with Vanessa Camacho’s interest in goal #3, as I believe it will best connect with potential panelists and interested audience members. Your personal stakes and case study are important, yet it’s how your experience illustrates greater themes in innovation online and in/beyond the classroom that will offer the greatest take-aways.
Your point “Digital collections are not new” is critical: as digital features, repositories, and interactive platforms quickly become obsolete, how does this work remain generative, agile, and responsive to community needs?
To find collaborators, you may want to peruse the projects highlighted by the National Humanities Alliance: https://humanitiesforall.org/
Evan, I like this topic. Working in preservation and family history related fields, digital collections continue to increase, especially following the pandemic. This topic involves many related history fields like archival, preservation, and digitization. There are many different practices when it comes to these fields and I’m interested in this.
I am very much interested in your work! I am an Ethnic Studies Professor creating an oral history archive on the Latinx community in Utah. I am relatively new to public history as a field. I am a trained sociologist and am contemplating submitting a proposal. I think we could present on the same panel.