Collaborative Notes for Session (add your own thoughts!)
Community Archives in the Digital Era: Building the South Asian-American Digital Archive (Samip Mallick)
For the past nine years,
SAADA has digitally collected, preserved, and shared stories of South Asian Americans. Though South Asians have been a presence in the United States for more than 130 years, their stories are not taught in classrooms, found in textbooks, or reflected in popular media. SAADA is working to change that. The organization’s post-custodial digital-only approach reimagines the potential of community archives in the digital era. The archive, which now includes more than 3,000 unique items, reflects the largest collection of materials related to those in the US who trace their heritage to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Maldives, and the many South Asian diaspora communities around the world. The First Days Project (http://www.firstdaysproject.org), where SAADA collects and shares stories from immigrants and refugees about their first experiences in the US, was awarded the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History. And through initiatives such as Tides, SAADA’s online magazine, Our Stories, a forthcoming book about South Asian American history for high school-aged readers, and Where We Belong, SAADA’s Pew Center for Arts & Heritage-funded collaboration with artists, the organization brings materials from the archive to life, making them relevant to how we understand the diversity of the American experience. Samip Mallick, SAADA’s Co-Founder and Executive Director, will speak about the organization’s founding, its approach to building a community-based post-custodial archive, and its future directions.
Duchamp goes Digital: Tales in Planning an Artist’s Research Portal (Susan Anderson)
Susan Anderson Laquer will discuss her experience with the Marcel Duchamp Research Portal at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and her international collaboration with a mix of colleagues (archivists, librarians, curators, IT professionals, advisors). She will share lessons learned on grant writing, project management, collection and user surveys, scope creep, developing a white paper, and now taking first steps towards implementation.
Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis: Digitizing (Almost) all the (Western) Medieval Manuscripts in Philadelphia (Diane Biunno)
In January 2016, a group of institutions organized by the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL) was awarded almost $500,000 by the Council on Library and Information Resources to digitize virtually all the region’s medieval manuscripts. This project,
Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis (BiblioPhilly), will create the country’s largest regional collection of digitized medieval manuscripts.
The three-year project, involving a total of 15 partner institutions, and led by Lehigh University, the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, and the Free Library of Philadelphia, will complete the digitization and online presentation of virtually all of the region’s medieval manuscripts—a total of almost 160,000 pages from more than 400 individual volumes. BiblioPhilly’s images and metadata will be hosted by the Penn Libraries’ manuscript portal,
OPenn, and will also be served via the IIIF protocol. The images will be released into the public domain at high resolution and available for download (by the page, manuscript, or collection) with descriptive metadata provided under the Creative Commons CC-BY-4.0 license.
In our presentation for KeystoneDH we will give an overview of our workflows, which include new manuscript cataloging and metadata quality assurance, provide a first look at our data online, and discuss our plans for making the data more easily accessible to humanists as the project progresses.
