eLabs Events
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Digital Editions and Collections: An Archivist’s Point of View
April 23, 2024 All day
Hosts
elabs@virginia.edu
About the Event
Drs. Shirley Moody-Turner and Sabrina Evans moderate a discussion with three archivists who have spearheaded the creation of digital and non-digital collections and resources: Dr. Lopez D. Matthews Jr., Jennifer Morris, and Sean Smith. This recorded interview showcases archivists’ viewpoints on digitizing initiatives, particular in regard to issues of preservation, access, institutional partnerships and collaborations, and community engagement. It also provides an alternative point of entry for thinking about creating digital editions and working with digital materials. One of the main goals of this conversation is to identify sites of shared vision and commitment for the many different practitioners working in the ecosystem of digitizations, digital collections, and digital editions, centering an archivist’s point of view on how digital partnerships and collaborations can be fruitful for all parties.
About the Presenters
Dr. Lopez D. Matthews Jr. is the State Archivist and Public Records Administrator for the District of Columbia. In this capacity he serves as Historian of the District of Columbia, Chair of the D.C. Historical Records Advisory Board, and Director of the DC Office of Public Records and Archives. He has published extensively and served on numerous boards and committees related to African American life, history, and archives. In 2023, he was appointed the Secretary of the Interior to the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House National Historic Site Advisory Commission. Dr. Matthews partnered with the Anna Julia Cooper Digital Project, the Anna Julia Cooper Society, and the Center for Humanities and Information at Penn State University to create the Anna Julia Cooper Digital Collection and host Douglass Day 2020 – Transcribe Cooper. This partnership made Cooper’s papers at the Moorland Spingarn Research Center digitally accessible to audiences worldwide.
Jennifer Morris is the archivist at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum, the first federally funded neighborhood museum located in Washington, D. C. Her research and archival interests focus on the care and preservation of family papers, photographs, and cultural heritage archives which document the community-based activities of individuals and groups. The Black Women’s Organizing Archive (BWOA) and the Center for Black Digital Research at Penn State University worked with Anacostia Community Museum in 2020 on a series of community archiving workshops. BWOA also worked with Jennifer Morris on an Archivist Roundtable in 2023 and on the 2024 Digitize Black Women’s Records Day event.
Sean Smith is a Senior Manager of Outreach and Education at the Archives of Ontario. In total, he has been preserving and sharing history for over 20 years. Since the pandemic, he has been focused on issues related to community development, GLAM Wiki and digital records. The Center for Black Digital Research at Penn State University had the honor of working with Smith on the digitization and transcription of the Mary Ann Shadd Cary papers at Archives of Ontario for Douglass Day 2023.
About the Moderators
Dr. Shirley Moody-Turner is associate professor and award-winning teacher of English and African American Studies at Penn State University, where she also co-directs, with P. Gabrielle Foreman, the Center for Black Digital Research/DigBlk. She is the founding director of the Black Women’s Organizing Archive (BWOA), a digital project which seeks to bring together the scattered archives of nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Black women’s organizing. She is also the founding director of the Anna Julia Cooper Digital Project, a cross-institutional partnership that worked with the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center on the digitization of the Anna Julia Cooper Papers and with Douglass Day 2020 to produce a community-based, crowd-sourced transcription of the collection. She is author and editor of several published and forthcoming books including the Penguin Portable Anna Julia Cooper and an interpretive biography on the educational vision and activism of Anna Julia Cooper.
Dr. Sabrina Evans is an assistant professor of English at Howard University and a JT Mellon Satellite Partner with the Center for Black Digital Research at Penn State University. She is co-project coordinator for the Black Women’s Organizing Archive, a digital project which seeks to bring together the scattered archives of nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Black women’s organizing. She was also the project coordinator for Douglass Day 2020: Transcribe Cooper and was an inaugural DigBlk scholar at the Center for Black Digital Research. Her current work focuses on the “constant agitation” of nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Black women within their intellectual-activist work, with a primary focus on Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.
