2023 DLG PARTNER Event

"Community: Building, Documenting, and Reaching Out" 


Wednesday, April 19

1-2 Welcome and Keynote

 “Invisible Histories Project: Saving Deep South LGBTQ History” Maigen Sullivan, Invisible Histories Project, Co-Founder and Director of Research & Development 

The Invisible Histories Project is a nonprofit located in Birmingham, AL that is locating, collecting, researching and creating educational events, exhibits, and programs around LGBTQ history in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and the Florida Panhandle. Additionally, IHP manages Queer History South, a network of over 600 people in 13 Southern states who work together toward best practices in Southern LGBTQ history, archiving, and education around those topics. This presentation will provide an overview of IHP's community outreach model, collections process, and how we work with partner institutions to ensure that collections stay local to the communities who produced them.  


Maigen Sullivan, PhD is Co-Founder and Director of Research & Development for the Invisible Histories Project (IHP), a nonprofit working with institutions and communities to collect, preserve, research and make accessible the rich and diverse histories of the LGBTQ Deep South. Maigen is adjunct faculty of Women & Gender Studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and has also taught at The University of Alabama (UA). Maigen earned a PhD in Educational Studies of Diverse Populations from UAB and a BA in History and MA in Women’s Studies in the Department of Gender & Race Studies from UA. Maigen was named the 2020 Society of American Archivists Innovator of the Year and a 2020 National Association of Multicultural Education Emerging Scholar. 

 

2:15-3:15 Lightning talks

Georgia Southern University's Institutional Repository and Special Collections Librarians will share their experience maintaining an outside partnership with the Willow Hill Heritage and Renaissance Center to better preserve African American history in Bulloch County. By offering community partners specialized resources, services, and support, Georgia Southern Libraries is able to work with partners that have built trust within their communities to better capture the historic memory of Bulloch County. This is part of Georgia Southern Libraries' effort to address the gaps within its own collections that have seen the historical underrepresentation of marginalized communities in their community.  


In 2022 Chipley Historical Center in Pine Mountain partnered with Bethany Missionary Baptist Church Cemetery, a historically Black cemetery located in Pine Mountain, to shed light on their neglected cemetery containing hundreds of graves. Many of these graves are overgrown and unmarked.  This ambitious project continues today and the focus has evolved from physically uncovering the graves to mapping the cemetery and creating an online database of names and information about each burial there.  This Lightning Talk will cover some of the things we have learned so far, both good and bad.

3:30-4:30

In 2016, the Coffee County Memory Project began collecting oral histories of community members who experienced federally mandated school desegregation in Coffee County, Georgia from 1965-1972. Individuals impacted by these events shared their experiences and, in several cases, detailed pressure campaigns that prompted personal choices. These choices ultimately shaped the trajectory of their lives and their community. 

Seven years later, this all-volunteer project continues to collect interviews and, with the publication of two virtual exhibitions, community involvement is growing.

T. Cat Ford will share the challenges, rewards and best practices that have contributed to the success of this grassroots project and brought community members together to gain a clearer understanding of their collective history.

Through an overview of recent community-focused preservation projects conducted in Brunswick, Georgia, this presentation addresses how involving undergraduate students in the process of collecting oral histories and using digital preservation techniques benefit both community partners and the students engaged in the work. Community partners receive services that they might be unable to perform on their own, including preservation of their history and historical materials, and the opportunity to share their past with the public. For students, these projects can serve as a “laboratory” to apply classroom theories in practical situations and develop new skills as they research and preserve local history.


Thursday, April 20

1-2 

Oral history interviews fill in the gaps of written history, especially for under-documented groups, topics, and events. They allow us to fill in historical narratives and silences with other voices and perspectives, as well as help us to understand the significance and meaning of what happened and why it happened. Georgia State University Library’s Special Collections and Archives has a long history of gathering and preserving oral history interviews.

 

During this presentation, presenters will discuss the history of the program and the oral history projects conducted at GSU. They will provide an overview of the types of workshops and trainings provided prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and discuss how archivists changed the structure of the program after returning from work from home and the trainings currently offered to students, faculty, and the community. Through this presentation, attendees will gain an understanding of GSU’s oral history training programs and how a program can be used to build relationships with students, faculty, and community organizations, as well as learn about the benefits and challenges of such a program.



2:15-3:15 Partner spotlight


The City of Savannah Municipal Archives has slowly been evolving their community archival program over the past six years in an effort to engage with residents, document local history, and preserve archival collections, all on a shoestring budget. Join Luciana Spracher, Municipal Archives Director, for a brief overview of the Savannah Community Memory Project, including origin, evolution, lessons learned, and where it is headed next.


Active in Atlanta between 1965 and 1989, the AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department’s Southeast Division served as a major liaison between civil rights activism and organized labor on a host of social issues. In 2021 Georgia State University, in partnership with the University of Maryland, received a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Hidden Collections grant to digitize the records of the Southeast Division and make them publicly available online, including through the Digital Library of Georgia. In this talk, we discuss the origins and goals of the project, our considerations for the digitization process, and some of the discoveries we have made while working with the Southeast Division records.  


3:30-4:30 

Mukurtu CMS, maintained by the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation (CDSC) at Washington State University (WSU), represents one way in which LIS professionals have reimagined what access means in the case of cultural heritage materials and in careful consideration of both “the need to know” and “the right to know.” Mukurtu’s creators – members of the Warumungu community of Australia, Dr. Kim Christen, and Craig Dietrich - developed a culturally sensitive framework for digitizing, describing, and making available Native and Indigenous collections. This platform, now utilized by communities across the globe, demonstrates the value of shared stewardship and proves that it is possible to make significant, nuanced changes to how we approach both physical and digital archives.  

This talk will introduce attendees to Mukurtu CMS and some of its functionalities, spotlight Mukurtu projects that I became familiar with during my time working at the CDSC, and consider digitization and long-term collaboration in light of Deloria and O’Neal’s calls for more equitable, complex, and conscientious stewardship of Indigenous and community-based archives. 


Over the course of the last two years the University of Georgia School of Law and Library have pursued a variety of grant funding opportunities to increase digitization efforts of our special collections and archives. This partner spotlight will touch on the grant writing process, discussing our rejections and successes, and give takeaways to others interested in digitization grants. This talk will culminate in the relationship building our grant writing has helped facilitate including the continued resource sharing with the Digital Library of Georgia. This partner spotlight will share details of the OAI harvesting used specific to our law library's Digital Commons institutional repository's documentation and provide visual examples of promotional efforts related to grant-funded digitization cycles and fulfillment.