Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals

This article addresses the politics of film digitization by arguing that we should reconsider archival and preservation “best practices” that require film restoration. Instead, it advocates for digitizing films “as is,” which, in turn, captures the film's current materiality (i.e., fading, scratches, and other facets that reveal age, wear, and use). Using the work of Luis Vale, one of the youth filmmakers from New York City's Lower East Side's Young Filmmaker Foundation's Film Club, as a case study, the article points to the importance of archiving and saving these youth films as part of a growing movement to look beyond Hollywood cultural production and preserving national moving image heritage. More broadly, this article highlights how archiving practices determine which histories are remembered and how.

In the past, oral history recordings often lay inert and ignored on archival or library shelves. The digital revolution has transformed accessibility to oral histories, primarily by opening digital archives to a variety of users. Nevertheless, many audiences, particularly in rural areas, still do not engage with these digital archives. By incorporating digital oral history content into public programs, however, public historians can involve their audiences in community dialogues that connect past and present and open new avenues for engaging with challenging contemporary issues. This approach employs the dialogue methodology of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience and has been successfully implemented in rural central New York State. Collecting with the intention of incorporating oral histories into community dialogue programs shifts the focus from static preservation and exhibition to a dynamic model of sharing authority, which directly engages one's local community.

Like other documentary editing projects, the Joseph Smith Papers—an effort to produce a comprehensive edition of the papers of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly known as Mormons—seeks to provide reliable access to “the authentic voice” of its eponymous historical figure in innovative ways. As a digital voice from the dust, the project makes Smith's words, character, and context accessible in the online representation of his papers in ways that forcefully illustrate the convergence of public and digital history. This article uses the Joseph Smith Papers Project (JSPP) as a case study to look at documentary collections at the intersection of digital and public history while exploring issues of scholarship, access, and transparency. The trends described here promise to have implications for the larger fields of digitally presented public history and documentary collections.

Postcards offer a wealth of information for researchers, teachers and students, and the public. This article documents how postcards can serve as an important form of historical evidence. Further, the article argues that digitizing postcards and making them accessible to wider audiences may yield an opportunity for community engagement with local history and local institutions that may, in turn, help to make local history relevant to teachers’ needs in the 21st-century classroom. In addition to discussing broad information about postcards and their use, the article introduces a digital project, Using Postcards as Historical Evidence, that seeks to highlight the importance and viability of postcards as documentary evidence and appropriate sources for interactive, inquiry-based pedagogy.

In 2013 the Dr. William M. Scholl Center for American History and Culture at the Newberry Library in Chicago undertook an initiative to expand the use of its collection of church and synagogue records through a new digital project titled Faith in the City: Chicago's Religious Diversity in the Era of the World's Fair. Though recent scholarship in the study of religion has highlighted the importance of such documents in understanding the contours of American religious life, the collection's origins as a genealogical resource have long shaped its use. By locating curated portions of the library's church histories on a digital map of the city alongside nearly two dozen essays on Chicago's religious history, Faith in the City aims to publicize the collection to new communities of users while also enhancing how local and family historians engage with the material. The following case study provides an overview of Faith in the City's development, the interventions it hopes to make, as well as challenges the platform faced. It concludes by briefly considering the potential of map-based presentations of cultural heritage collections.

Historic library collections offer a rich and underexplored resource for teaching undergraduate and graduate students about new digital approaches, methodologies, and platforms. Their scope and scale can make them difficult to analyze in their physical form, but remediated onto a digital platform, they offer valuable insights into the process of archive creation and the importance of making their content available to audiences that cannot normally access it. The Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project (JLPP) was launched by students, faculty, and library professionals in 2014 to create an online archive of marks of ownership—bookplates, stamps, inscriptions—contained within books from the original library collection of St. Ignatius College, precursor to Loyola University Chicago. The project grew out of student work for a university museum exhibition commemorating the bi-centennial of the restoration of the Society of Jesus (more commonly known as the Jesuits). Utilizing the popular social media image-sharing site Flickr, the JLPP seeks to foster a participatory community of students, scholars, collectors, and the broader public interested in the history of early and modern Catholic print and the intellectual framework and approach of 19th-century Jesuit education. Initially intended to provide students with the chance to learn how to conceptualize, plan, and build a digital archive, the JLPP has proven equally effective for teaching about digital scholarship, shared authority, and, rather unexpectedly, about the materiality of collections in the digital age

This article traces the development of Southern Places, an online digital collection developed by Middle Tennessee State University's Center for Historic Preservation (CHP) and the James E. Walker Library for the purpose of creating a digital presence for the Center's work over the past thirty years. After outlining previous digitization projects undertaken by the CHP in partnership with the Walker Library and other institutions, attention is paid to the technical decisions made in terms of the selection of a content management system and Web hosting, metadata protocols, and the place of shared authority in the contemporary, post-physical archival landscape. The article also describes recent digitization and access efforts at Middle Tennessee State University and partnerships with other universities, libraries, and archives across the state.

This article asks how public audiences are negotiating the material world of archives and artifacts in the digital age. The digital age would seem to have diminished the physical experience of the archive and artifact, creating a world of pure information. However, the binary of virtual and physical obscures more than it explains. In recent years, digital tools have begun to reconnect public audiences to the physical world in sometimes surprising ways. This article draws examples from interpretive projects using mobile devices, crowdsourcing in museum environments, and explorations of digital audio to show how physical experiences of cities, museums, and sound have taken on greater interpretive weight and salience as a result of digital interventions. Finally, it considers the implications of such digital interventions for curatorial practice, asking how digital tools can accentuate the ways that history is both contained in and expressed through material archives and artifacts.