2024 Event

Openness: Expanding Collections, Communities, and Reuse 

Register

Wednesday, April 17

1-2 Welcome and Keynote

Licensing and Use Fees at the Missouri Historical Society, Lauren Sallwasser

In 2015, the Missouri Historical Society established an open access policy, which removed all of our previous licensing requirements and usage fees. This presentation will explore both ideological and practical considerations for moving away from restrictive use policies and towards open access. It will also discuss how our open access policy has been implemented and what it means in practice.  

Lauren Sallwasser is the Associate Archivist in the Photographs and Prints Department at the Missouri Historical Society (MHS) in St. Louis. She is responsible for handling in-person and remote reference requests, filling reproduction orders, and processing new acquisitions. She has also served as the project director on two IMLS grants to process and digitize material from the Sievers Studio Collection. She regularly contributes material to the MHS social media channels, including the History Happens Here blog, Instagram, and Pinterest. She holds a Master of Science in Library Science from Simmons College and a Bachelor of Arts in History from Truman State University. 

2 to 2:15

Break

2:15-2:45 

The Future of the DPLA Aggregation, John Bracken, DPLA

2:45 to 3:15

Optional Discussion

3:15 to 3:30

Break

3:30-4:15

Your Friendly Local Archivist: Helping to Preserve and Share Community History One County at a Time, Lauren LeDesma, GPLS

The Local Archivist position within the Archival Services and Digital Initiatives Department at the Georgia Public Library Services, is responsible for supporting the many archival collections found in public libraries, local governments, and smaller USG institutions without full-time archival staff throughout the state of Georgia. In addition to archival collections, these institutions hold local history and research records that are pertinent to the history and culture of Georgia, but typically need more resources to inventory, process, preserve, and provide access to their physical collections. The work of the Local Archivist is intended to provide these resources through processing collections in the field and at the Georgia Archives, supporting collection management, completing inventories of local collections, and providing direct training on archival processing as needed. The primary goal of the Local Archivist is to help keep collections of historical value available in their local communities. 

As the first person in the Local Archivist position with GPLS, I would like to review the progress that has been made in achieving the goals of my position since my hire date of August 2023. I will aim to identify what success has been attained, where I have been met with setbacks or frustrations, and what I would like to implement moving forward to further develop the aim and intention of this position.


Thursday, April 18

1-2 


The UGA Press explores the impact of its signature open access project, the Georgia Open History Library (GOHL), a collection of 45 formerly out of print open digital editions funded by a Humanities Open Book grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The GOHL ebook collection is freely available via the University System of Georgia’s Open Educational Resource (OER) repository, Affordable Learning Georgia, The Digital Library of Georgia (DLG), the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), and Manifold Scholar, as well as via a range of open access content aggregators. Beyond its role as an invaluable resource to both general readers and scholars, this project initiated a deeper understanding of open access at the Press. From the enthusiastic response from the scholarly community to its robust global usage metrics, the GOHL serves as an example of the possibilities and public good of open access scholarship. Our presentation will take attendees through the inception of the GOHL project, its continuation, and the exciting results of making this collection open access.

This presentation introduces the Sounding Spirit Digital Library (SSDL) and shares how our metadata and digital interface facilitate access, interoperability, and research. An initiative of the Sounding Spirit Collaborative at Emory University’s Center for Digital Scholarship, SSDL is a thematic collection of 1,300 digitized books from seven contributing institutions. The digital library features southern sacred vernacular music books published between 1850 and 1925, including gospel songbooks, spiritual collections, tunebooks, hymnals, and Sunday school songbooks. SSDL is forthcoming in the fall of 2024 and is funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

 

Robust metadata supports 1) browsing and faceted search of the SSDL, 2) interoperability through data sharing partnerships, and 3) quantitative research with the collection. Metadata fields rely on external and local controlled vocabularies whenever possible to facilitate faceting and interoperability. The profile expands the project’s reach by including fields corresponding to the requirements of three data sharing partners: the Digital Library of Georgia, the Atla Digital Library, and Répertoire International des Sources Musicales. Readux, the digital platform for our project, supports data harvesting by these partners by including metadata in International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) manifests for each book. Finally, our metadata includes fields of interest to researchers including various categories of places associated with the works; dimensions for width as well as height; and characteristics associated with format, genre, identity, geography, and use.


2:15-3:45 Partner spotlights 


The Company 1433 Project sheds light on the often-overlooked history of Black Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) members.  This project pays tribute to the impactful work of the CCC Company 1433, an all-Black unit instrumental in unlocking access to the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge during the 1930s and 40s. Through research, active community involvement, and the creation of a comprehensive digital archive, the project not only preserves but also shares the invaluable contributions of Company 1433. Join us as we discuss the current status of our project and efforts underway to create visibility for the innovation and conservation work achieved by these unsung heroes who shaped the landscape and history of south Georgia and the Okefenokee region.  


The Southern Labor Archivist and our Graduate Research Assistant at Georgia State University curated our exhibit, "Fighting for Freedom: Labor and Civil Rights in the American South" through primary source material gifted to us from the AFL-CIO Civil Rights Southeast Department and the AFL-CIO Archive at UMD. Our curation process began by reading through hundreds of pages of primary source material, including photographs, newspaper clippings, departmental records, letters, speeches, and audiovisual recordings from the 1930s through the 1980s. We organized our artifacts around the cohesive narratives of labor and civil rights activists as they moved through postwar America into the turbulence of the 50s and 60s. Our “Fighting for Freedom” presentation will discuss how digital collections like ours make scholarship more accessible to a new generation of researchers. 


The Voter Education Project (VEP) was an Atlanta-based organization, originally affiliated with the Southern Regional Council, and dedicated to funding voter education programs, citizenship education, and voter registration activities in the eleven Southern states. Approximately 500 newspaper clippings were digitized as part of an internship program with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. To expedite and improve metadata description of these items, the members of the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library’s Digital Services Department began using ChatGPT to “read” and summarize OCR’d archival content. This brief presentation will address the novel process of using ChatGPT to enhance archival description and improve access to the Atlanta University Center’s digital collections.


5.Blynne Olivieri Parker