VRA Conference Minneapolis 2024

What does a library or archive do when over 250 disaffiliating United Methodist Church (UMC) representatives arrive at the door with all their records? When faced with this question in 2023, Pitts Theology Library staff acted swiftly and decisively to ensure that these records would represent more than a difficult moment in the UMC tradition by contributing to a project much larger in scope and scale that will benefit people across the state. Fortuitously, the influx of records from former UMC churches coincided with a digital humanities project led by Pitts, the Historic Rural Church Archive. The goal of the project is to support researchers, genealogists, and churchgoers exploring the histories of rural communities through the focal point of local churches across Georgia. Our panel will discuss the workflows involved in managing an unexpected and rapid accession of church collections, including accessioning, processing, and description. We will also discuss the new procedures we developed to expand engagement with the materials through the HRC Archive, including plans for community contributions, outreach activities, scanning days at local libraries, and more.

This panel is a case study on collaborative archiving and digital humanities practices with lessons learned about managing expectations, community-submitted records, holistic workflows, and external partnerships. Attendees can expect to learn just how messy an unexpected, large-scale acquisition can be but also see the potential of digital projects for making the best of archival materials for a wide audience.

Spiraling costs, limited time, complicated migrations, and user needs have led many institutions to find ways to connect disparate data repositories together for discovery, preservation, and more. Whether breaking out of multiple digital systems siloed at one institution or bringing together multiple institutions into a shared system, harnessing data from a variety of repositories requires a lot of decision-making. What are the common metadata fields and which are most important to users? What data types are available and which are most easily ingested for a common system? Are there tasks repositories share or are their multiple tasks, each important to a different constituency? With multiple players, the decision making must be collective and the maintenance will be ongoing. Our presenters will talk about these challenges and the need for high-level governance to start multi-stakeholder collaborative projects and keep them going.

Visual Resources in the era of Virtual Reality: a Framework for Digital Primary Source Literacy
Colleen Hoelscher

Museums, libraries, and archives are ever-increasingly creating digitized versions of primary source documents from their holdings, making visual resources findable and usable by researchers around the world. These resources are a boon for those teaching in the humanities as they allow students to conduct primary source research beyond the confines of their university library and highly curated published primary source collections. In addition, the shift to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has led to increased use of and comfort with digital archival sources, including visual resources. Even as digital primary sources become more available, the process of critically evaluating them has become more daunting: “deep fakes,” deceptive editing via Photoshop or other means, AI creations, filters, misleading metadata, and curatorial bias can all deceive students. This paper will provide guidance to librarians, educators, and other cultural heritage professionals who engage in teaching digital primary source literacy. Drawing on the SAA/ACRL Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy, it proposes a framework of key competencies displayed by the digital literate working with online archival sources: the ability to locate and access digital primary sources, critically evaluate digital sources for authenticity and bias, and correctly cite digital primary sources.

The Human Touch: Copyright Protections for Works Created by Deities, Creatures, and Machines
Kiowa Hammons

The 2014 Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices: "only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention" [1]. But can copyright law so easily discount creative content such as Monkey selfies, elephant oil paintings, songs written by religious deities, or pastoral landscape paintings by artificial intelligence? Particularly with the recent abundance of infringement cases regarding AI generated materials, how are the courts and we as users of AI systems (and owners of pets) come to terms with the value of non-human intellectual property?

Evaluating Digital Collections for Accessibility
Nora Davies

A presentation discussing methods for evaluating digital collections for accessibility. Begins with a breakdown of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and Universal design and ends with tips for evaluating digital collections and some examples of accessible collections. Attendees will learn the current standards for web accessibility and how to apply that to their own institutional collections or evaluate existing collections. This is especially relevant to attendees working with visual resources online who are interested in broadening the access of their collections.

In this session representatives from Minnesota-based visual collections will provide an overview of the collections they work with that are unique to the area and give attendees a window into the projects they are undertaking to make these local collections accessible to their community and beyond.

Heather Shirey, Professor of Art History at the University of St. Thomas and Co-Director of Urban Art Mapping, and Rita Morgan, MA student in Art History and Museum Studies at the University of St. Thomas and Research Assistant for Urban Art Mapping, will share how their interdisciplinary research team documents and analyzes street art that is often ephemeral and fleeting. Their George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art archive seeks to document street art from around the world created in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and as part of an ongoing movement demanding social justice and equality.

Rita Walaszek Arndt, Program and Outreach Manager for Native American Initiatives at the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS), will speak about her experience providing access to MNHS’s Native American collections and co-curating the current exhibits “Our Home: Native Minnesota” and “Reframing Our Stories.” The latter exhibit features archival photos of Native community members taken by Twin Cities photojournalists from the 1950s through the 1980s, now presented with context provided by community they depict.

Rebecca Gillette, Associate Director and Community Engagement Lead for Mapping Prejudice, will share how the Mapping Prejudice project works to identify and map racial covenants, clauses that were inserted into property deeds to keep people who were not White from buying or occupying homes. From their base in the University of Minnesota Libraries, their interdisciplinary team collaborates with community members to expose the history of structural racism and support the work of reparations.

Molly Huber, Outreach Coordinator for the Minnesota Digital Library (MDL), will talk about how MDL supports discovery and education through access to unique digital collections shared by cultural heritage organizations from across the state of Minnesota. MDL maintains a robust digital storytelling program, interpreting and packaging the materials in the aggregated collection through different lenses and formats to provide a multitude of entry points. MDL also expands access and digital capacity through the Scan for Keeps program, loaning digitization kits at no cost for community scanning events or internal archiving work.

Between Images and Words
As this year's keynote speaker, author Kao Kalia Yang will read from and explore how the form of the picture book has expanded meaning within her work. Yang will discuss how the contributions of her illustrators have shifted and deepened her stories, how the conversation between both opens up possibilities for readers of all ages, and what lives in between images and words: the breadth of the emotional landscape.

Kao Kalia Yang is a Hmong American teacher, speaker, and writer. She is the award-winning author of the memoirs, The Latehomecomer, The Song Poet, Somewhere in the Unknown World, and Where Rivers Part. Yang co-edited the groundbreaking book, What God is Honored Here?: Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss By and For Native Women and Women of Color. She is a librettist for The Song Poet Opera (commissioned by Minnesota Opera). Her children’s books, A Map Into the World, The Most Beautiful Thing, The Shared Room, Yang Warriors, From the Tops of the Trees, The Rock in My Throat, and Caged center Hmong children and families who live in our world, who dream, hurt, and hope in it. Yang’s work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Library Association, and has garnered four Minnesota Book Awards. She was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Carleton College. Yang is McKnight, Soros, and Guggenheim fellow. You can learn more about Kao Kalia Yang and her work on her website.

This event is sponsored by JSTOR (ITHAKA)