CLIR Events 2022

The DHC Symposium concludes with the closing plenary panel Real World Ripples: Current Events & Digitizing Collections.

Thoughtfully planning for and executing successful digitization initiatives can take years. But when centered on digitizing hidden collections, projects often hold the potential to illuminate the present in unpredictable ways. How can we keep digitization operations going for the long term while leaving room to be flexible and–when necessary–to regroup in order to adapt to changing circumstances and needs? In what ways can our digitization strategies and digitized collections deepen public engagement with contemporary issues? How can we keep our digital collections growing while still supporting efforts to raise awareness about the value of using cultural materials to understand current events? Panelists will offer their perspectives on questions like these, followed by a moderated discussion and audience Q&A.

Presentation 1
 
PrisonPandemic: Scaling and Adapting Document Management During COVID-19
Joanne DeCaro, Alexis Rowland, Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez, Keramet Reiter, Kristin Turney, Naomi Sugie, Gabe Rosales, Mariela Villalba Madrid
University of California - Irvine, United States of America
 
The United States’ now half century project of hyper incarceration has resulted in innumerable tragedies, much of which can be known only through the voices of those directly impacted. PrisonPandemic represents a unique archive of narratives produced and collected in an unprecedented era of mass death—the COVID-19 pandemic. UCI PrisonPandemic is a digital archive built to preserve the stories of people incarcerated in California prisons during the COVID-19 pandemic. PrisonPandemic amplifies the often inaccessible or silenced voices and experiences of the incarcerated. We will discuss the challenges of collecting and managing PrisonPandemic’s corpus that are inherent with working with a highly vulnerable and marginalized population.
 
 
Presentation 2
 
The Border in Print: Digitizing Periodicals in the US-Mexico Border Region
Mikaela Selley, Nicolas Kanellos, Carolina Villarroel
Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Program, United States of America
 
Presenters will share the Recovering the U.S. Literary Heritage program methods and protocols involved in the digitization of 200 newspapers published along the US-Mexico border and the creation of a public-facing platform that will become available in 2023.
 
 
Presentation 3
 
Digitizing Vascular Plant Specimens from a Country at War
David Giblin(1), Steffi Ickert-Bond(2), Eric DeChaine(3)
1: University of Washington, Burke Museum, United States of America; 2: University of Alaska-Fairbanks, Museum of the North, United States of America; 3: Western Washington University, United States of America
 
We started digitizing vascular plant specimens from Far East Russia in Fall 2021. In Winter 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine, which introduced an element to this project we did not anticipate. Here we discuss the importance of digitization in terms of future access and how natural history collections transcend geopolitical boundaries.