Month: April 2018

by Michelle Slater

The British Museum is a world renowned institution known for its rich history of collecting antiquities and priceless works of art from around the world. The Museum is open year-round for free to visitors in London, but recognizes that visiting in person is limiting to the many more people they wish to reach. While they are known for their strict access and photography policy upon visiting the museum, they do make many efforts to share their collections digitally, through controlled marketing and outreach programs. The British Museum has made it a part of their mission to reach more of the general public, and has implemented several new outreach projects using digital and virtual programming.

One way the Museum is bringing light to its collections and internal practices is through “Curator’s Corner,” a youtube series hosted on the British Museum’s youtube channel. Each episode is an intimate encounter with an exceptional or bizarre selection from the Museum’s collection. The series is designed to peak interest on niche objects and topics, focusing on particularly interesting or rare objects in the Museum’s collection, and items that may not be on display as they undergo restoration.

The “Curator’s Corner” series highlights the different departments and staff who care for and interact with the collections on a daily basis, creating transparency around the many studies and ongoing practices at the British Museum being conducted behind closed doors. Every episode is guided by speaker whose occupation varies from topic to topic, and runs the gamete of museum professionals including subject specialists, department curators, scientists, researchers, and more. The episode’s host often reports directly from their office, the gallery floor, the archive stacks, or scientific labs to show the wide range of work being done throughout the Museum, and to give viewers a look inside their workspaces- a site that the average visitor would never see.

Each episode runs between five to ten minutes, and there is a total of twenty-five episodes in the series to date, spanning three seasons. Topics range from ‘the effects of light on works of art’ to ‘depictions of ancient demons.’ “Curator’s Corner” draws in viewers with topics so varied that it is impossible to gloss them over. Items from the Museum’s collection are discussed in-depth using plain language, so that the average viewer can relate to and understand the themes discussed.

The “Curator’s Corner” video series is shared across the Museum’s social media accounts and blog. While every blog post includes an episode of “Curator’s Corner” linked from youtube, not every episode has a coinciding blog post- which tend to be more illustrative with multiple pictures and blocks of scholarly text about the featured topic. In this way, the blog is a further resource for select topics covered in “Curator’s Corner.” With over 81k subscribers on youtube, episodes range in views from week to week, some reaching upwards of 112k views. As the series progresses, “Curator’s Corner” is able to reach a wider, disparate group of viewers with engaging and unique programming, elevating the public interest and knowledge in the collections held by the British Museum.

by Thera Webb

The Digital Prison Archive is an outreach project for the Prison Public Memory Project, an organization that currently focuses on collecting and archiving stories and experiences from people connected to the three prisons in Hudson New York – the House of Refuge for Women (1887-1904), the NY State Training School for Girls (1904-1975), and the Hudson Correctional Facility (1976-present). As stated on their website the “Project works with individuals and organizations in communities with prisons across the United States to recover, preserve, interpret, present, and honor the memories of what took place in those institutions,” and in doing so they engage with people who were incarcerated and people who worked at the prisons, as well as community members.

The Prison Public Memory Project has a number of outreach projects – including very active Facebook and Instagram pages. You can listen to oral histories of prison employees and people who were incarcerated at the prisons, on their SoundCloud or on their website. They occasionally hold pop-up museums at community events, as well as hosting speakers, all of which can been seen on their YouTube channel as well as their website.

The Digital Prison Archive is currently housed on Flickr, which makes the content searchable and easily available to the average researcher or user. This means that, while the Prison Public Memory Project is in the process of moving into their renovated physical space – which they acquired in 2015 – some of their files are fully accessible to the public.

Rather than hosting the entire collection of records online, the Digital Prison Archive has digitized one box, as sort of a taster for the collection. Since the archive is not affiliated with any institutions or libraries, this is a good way to introduce the public to what their records hold. The digitized records are all related to the NY State Training School for Girls and were created in the 1920s. These records range from photographs and letters, to the intake histories of young women who were incarcerated there.

Having these stories online both and supplemented with scans of primary sources that you can zoom in on and read, adds an extra dimension to the experiences of these women. Not only can you read about their experiences being incarcerated, and listen to oral histories from some of the women, but you can also delve into their experiences exactly as written when they were in the State Training School for Girls.

Being able to access images of the original documents involves readers on a deeper level, as well as drawing more attention to the main page of the Prison Public Memory Project by directing viewers who would like to learn more to browse the site.

by Caroline Tanski

On May 1^st, 1718, the Mission San Antonio de Valero (which would come to be known as the Alamo) was founded, and along with it the city of San Antonio, Texas. While activities will culminate in the first week of May, 2018, San Antonio is celebrating its tercentenary for the duration of the year with exhibits, events, and community service projects. One of these celebrations comes from the Special Collections and Archives of the University of Texas, San Antonio. It’s called La Puerta, and it’s an online exhibit that displays the sense of community, the humor, and the good food that make San Antonio a city unlike any other.

Comprising twelve categories, the photos represented in La Puerta were pulled from UTSA Special Collections as well as the archives of local newspapers. With well over three million photographs, the Special Collections photograph collection is one of the most popular resources in the archives. When initial conversations about the tercentenary began, says Kristin Law, the UTSA archivist who helped to conceive and execute La Puerta along with a team that included a digital archivist, a designer, and a communications professional, the idea was for a “portal to San Antonio history.” It quickly became clear that the most effective resource at their disposal was the wealth of photographs in the university’s collections. Dating back to the 1860s—long before the university’s founding in 1969—the photographs documented areas of life including activism, culinary traditions, the rodeo, and “stunts and critters,” all of which became categories in the final exhibit.

At the same time that exhibit planning began, UTSA got a new president, Thomas Taylor Eighmy. Katie Rojas, the manuscripts archivist for UTSA Special Collections, says that Eighmy has been “gunning for connecting to the community,” which has encouraged the university at all levels to optimize opportunities to reach out to the public. Special Collections prioritizes collecting materials that relate to the culture of San Antonio and South Texas: African-American and LGBTQ communities in the region, the history of women and gender, Mexican-American activism, and Tex-Mex food, among others. La Puerta was a timely way to tie the university’s history and holdings to the vibrant history of the city and generations of its occupants.

Law says that the exhibit was designed with minimalist text, partly due to time constraints—after the first conversations in June, the exhibit went live in February, 2018. In those eight months the photographs had to be scanned, metadata had to be created for them, and the website had to be built (the designer was able to customize a WordPress template, which saved a lot of time and effort). Each category in the exhibit has two or three sentences summarizing the grouping. Each photograph is labeled with a title, a call number, and the name of the collection from which it came. Without bulky text blocks, the viewer can scroll through the galleries and get lost in imagining the action, the life, in the vivid scenes captured.

When asked how she selected which photographs to include, Law says that she wanted to “stick with the themes but show people what they haven’t seen, what I would want to show to my friends and family.” Law recognizes that many of the photographs in the library’s holdings came from newspaper archives, which historically featured white residents and did not represent the true diversity of the population. Law and the other creators of La Puerta sought to find diverse people, activities, and lifestyles in the archives so that everyone who looked at the exhibit would be able to find something to which they could relate.

The exhibit, like the Special Collections and Archives, is intended for everyone. Rojas says that UTSA Special Collections serves “students and faculty as well as researchers from the community and, well, anywhere.” As the collecting priorities indicate, Special Collections is making a concerted effort to address gaps in its collections and to fully represent the wealth of variety of San Antonio life. With an enthusiastic university leader, Special Collections is continuing its normal outreach (including pop-up exhibits and zine fairs, which connected archivists and librarians to new people, some of whom had never heard of special collections) and pursuing opportunities such as La Puerta. Whether it’s in familiar faces, activities, streets they may drive down, or festivals they attend, Law says of La Puerta, “I hope the folks who see this get to see themselves in it, somehow. I just hope they get to see themselves.”

by Rebecca Sasseville

There’s no avoiding the power of social media for a cultural heritage institution. It’s free and easy to use for accounts and followers alike. Social media is used by all walks a life, everywhere in the world. Any person who has an internet connection is a potential follow of an institution’s social media account. Facebook has approximately two billion users. Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter accounts number in the hundreds of millions. Sharing online is embedded in today’s culture.

Archives Hashtag Party (AHP) started in the summer of 2017 by the National Archives Records Administration (NARA). Their press release asks archives to, “Come hang out on social media and share highlights from your collections around a different theme each month. We want to mingle with archives from all over and learn about the treasures you hold.” David S. Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, wrote in his blog that, while the hashtags are entertaining “it also show[s] the relevance of archives.” AHP asks all to participate if they can, not just archives, but libraries, museums and all cultural institutions around the world. NARA posts the theme about a week before the first Friday of the following month. In the past eight months over 500 institutions have participated!

I run a public library for a small town in Massachusetts and I have very little funding that can go towards outreach. Our business Facebook and Instagram accounts are free and it’s so simple I can have my high school volunteers make a post for us on the fly. Due to the bundling of posts using the same hashtag, an AHP post by my little library will be seen among posts from larger institutions, giving us enormous potential exposure worldwide. Institutions are working together to advocate for the field. The fact that partakers in AHP can include accounts ranging from the almighty NARA to my small library further shows how much power social media has.

The first hashtag was #ArchivesSquadGoals in August 2017. NARA’s blog explains it as, “a theme that celebrated friendship, style, and history.” By embracing a term like “squad goals” the parties are reaching a younger audience. So far, most of the themes have fit at least vaguely with a holiday that occurs during that month: January’s hashtag was #ArchivesResolutions and February’s was #ArchivesBlackHistory. September’s hashtag was #ArchivesCute, which doesn’t fit into a typical September celebration, but there’s never not a good time to see photos of kittens and babies!

#ArchivesAwesomeWomen was March 2018’s hashtag making use of Women’s History Month’s rise in popularity. Many cultural heritage institutions may have already queued up social media posts about women in their collections so adding this hashtag once it was announced would have made sharing content easier. NARA naturally joined in that March by sharing a photograph of astronaut Sally Ride on Instagram, writing that she ”was just 32 when she became the first American woman in space. 🚀✨ So yeah, we’re feeling pretty good about our lifetime accomplishments so far. 😬” National Archives uses emojis, everyone, can you believe it? How cool!

Down time on Air Force One during a trip to Oklahoma calls for a game of #TrivialPursuit! 06/05/1985 #PresidentReagan #ArchivesGameNight pic.twitter.com/Uxaa7Cbyer

— RonaldReaganLibrary (@Reagan_Library) October 12, 2017

In October 2017 the hashtag was #ArchivesGameNight. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library posted a photo on their Twitter of travelers on a flight to Oklahoma on Air Force One who are playing Trivial Pursuit to pass the time. The photo gives Reagan, a leader that many people on social media may not have even been alive for during his presidency, some personality and humanity and it’s fun to see the 80’s clothing and large eyeglasses of the women!

The power of photographs are undeniable. Archives are showcasing their collections and their personalities. Archives having fun with their posts by using hashtags, emojis and casual language invites new users to their social media accounts and therefore the institutions’ resources. Ferriero, wrote in his blog that, “One of our primary goals for this campaign is to boost the visibility of archives across the country.” Judging by the likes, reblogs, and retweets of the many of posts using the AHP hashtags it’s working.

Further reading:

https://www.archives.gov/campaigns/archives-hashtag-party

https://aotus.blogs.archives.gov/2017/08/25/join-us-for-an-archives-hashtag-party/

by Caroline Tanski

As the story often goes, Felicia Williamson didn’t intend to be an archivist. She studied German and European history and pursued historical research through a Fulbright scholarship in Austria. She took a student job in circulation at her college library and began to apply for PhD programs so she could become a history professor. Then one day a librarian she worked with pulled her aside and said, “It seems like you enjoy this work. Have you thought about becoming a librarian instead?”

Williamson knew from her own experience as a researcher that she in fact wanted to be an archivist. She earned her MLS from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where she worked as a graduate assistant and met her husband, a digital archivist. Before graduate school, Williamson spent several years working in congressional archives, learning how to understand organizational structure and building skills as a team leader. She left to become the head of special collections for the Sam Houston State University Archives in Huntsville, Texas, where she stayed for four years.

Then, after almost a decade in the field, Williamson saw that the Dallas Holocaust Museum and Center for Education and Tolerance had an opening for an archivist. Given her professional credentials as well as her academic work in German and European history, the fit couldn’t have been better. The Dallas Holocaust Museum was founded in 1984 by survivors who had settled in Dallas. It was created as a memorial that would call visitors to react to history and form opinions. A capital campaign to build a new museum and expand paused during the 2008 financial crisis, and was taken up again in 2011-2012 with a period of hiring and institutional reorganization. The focus of the organization and the archives shifted to both the Holocaust and human rights, addressing many other genocides and human rights tragedies. It was during this wave that Williamson joined the museum, and that the collecting policy for the archives was broadened to include human rights materials. “History is what gets recorded,” Williamson says, “but also what gets collected.”

With her background in congressional and academic archives, Williamson had robust professional qualifications but had not worked in a museum archives before. The Dallas Holocaust Museum Archives is a one-person shop, so she didn’t have colleagues to turn to for advice. So Williamson cold-called every museum archivist in Dallas to arrange coffees, lunches, tours, and anything else that would give her an opportunity to meet face-to-face and gather knowledge. What she learned was that the archives that were doing interesting, important things were the ones that were acting as builders instead of maintainers. “Libraries and archives can become forgotten within an organization,” she says. “One thing I’ve learned is to make sure the archives is included in the vision, the core statements, in the strategic plan. Those are the guiding documents that actually have bearing.” Williamson set about to ensure that her archives were recognized in the museum’s core documentation. It took eighteen months for those changes to be made, but the archives are now inextricably linked to the museum’s vision of success.

In July, 2016, five police officers were shot and killed on streets right next to the museum by an Army Reserves veteran who was motivated by police violence against people of color. Williamson recognized in her new collecting policy a responsibility to respond to the events by gathering oral histories from witnesses. Never having faced this situation before, she once again picked up the phone and called archivists across the country who had worked in the aftermath of crises to learn from their experiences. She went out and spoke with witnesses, with police officers when possible, while respecting the sensitivity and tragic context of the task.

Williamson’s career has been marked by compassionate outreach and sophisticated inreach. Being the sole archivist for the museum can be overwhelming, but she enjoys that “rarely are there two blocks of thirty minutes that are alike.” Taking a cue from successes in Austin, she and her husband, along with other local archivists, are actively planning to bring an archives bazaar to Dallas, taking materials out of institutions and into the city streets, collaborating with food vendors and microbreweries. Williamson wants to get out there where the people are. She wants to be part of opening archives to new audiences, and of bringing new life back into the archives. Building off of the legacy of the museum, Williamson plans to continue reaching out.