Project STAND Minutes (current)
Date: April 25, 2018
New Member Introductions (UC Irvine Elvia Arryo Ramirez, Audra Eagle Yun, Thuy Vo Dang, part of Special Collections & Archives),
a. Thuy’s project, looking at outreach opportunities with regards to student records,
b. Thuy Curator of Southeast Asian-American Studies (http://www.humanities.uci.edu/aas/ ), started as a result of student activism, students protesting in the 1990’s and making demands for Asian students, doing other projects like exhibitions telling the story
c. Beginnings of Activism for the Department of Asian American Studies
d. What is effective in getting traction on your project? Working closely with department chair who is also new and wanted to know the history of the department, funding for students, internship; also working with ethnic studies faculty;
e. Lael’s asked them to type up description of project and send links for rest of the team, Transforming Knowledge…grant (students figure out what is missing from the historical record, collecting histories and photographs, etc.)
f. Using student workers as part of the process, creating a new generation of archivists/historians, alumni established a scholarship fund as a response to students activity
Committee Updates (Committee Descriptions, Secretary update-Shannon Walker @ Arizona State) Athena Jackson and description for the ethics committee (goal is to formulate language and phrasing), another institution interested in the ethics committee
1. Web Committee Update from Trevor and Chris, welcoming Christela and Tamara to Web Committee (UC San Diego), already identified areas of improvement, also Helen (Case Western) working on access to full access to WordPress site, working on building Collections area and Collections Highlights for each institution, pulling photos, some photos not identified so need to follow up with institutions, received new collections surveys from five institutions, have 18 institutions so far have submitted, 32 total, so far collection assessment forms, Question of institutions vs. repositories, Total of 171 collections what is on word press site.
2. Helen and Collections assessment survey – 171 surveys from 24 institutions, most common format manuscript, publications then format; 23 have digital; 19 with audio video; topics – African American, anti-war, women’s rights, global/international, Latinx, LBTQ, climate, religious minorities; Decades – 60’s/70’s, 80-89; access readiness 96 full processed 49 accessioned with description; 100% of non-digitized are ready for digitization; concerns – ownership; Wondered about size of LGBTQ collections (ASU’s biggest collection @ 156 linear feet)
a. How can we use this data for our own institutions? How can this inform us and our work? (Reveals gaps in collecting, use for applying for grants, proposals for grant/initiatives, awareness of collections, materials buried within other collections?
b. Help by making connections with community groups, help us connect with each other especially as we are digitizing collections,
c. How other institutions are handling copyright and privacy,
d. Maybe create an infographic on website representing data, good to have other visual representations of the data,
e. Some doing some geo-mapping of participating institutions, see strengths and weaknesses of collections,
f. Idea of placing data into region/national demographic data as well as institutional demographic data and how collections relate/represent or fail to represent
3. Communications Committee – How much do we want to publicize? How do we communicate so that it is not used improperly, how much do we keep in-house, how much do we put “out there”; building an “intranet” for participating institutions for things you don’t want outward facing (For DRAFT documentation?),
a. Data should be out there, with narratives that come up (since the beginning of the project, we have done this…)
b. Guest posts on the website Blog to share narratives with stats, click on data point that leads to a “story”;
c. We do have charts and graphs produced by the Google Forms from surveys;
d. If you are “inspired” please write up something for the Blog, have a schedule by month?
e. Google form; Do we know how many people are looking at our site?
f. Also creating a Twitter account for Project STAND, can use that also, share out on SAA’s Twitter also an option, what is the Twitter handle? Lae’l will send it out to everyone
C. Questionnaire Responses (Goals)
1. Summaries – sending these out vial email
D. S.A.V.E Methodology – Lae’l send out during last communication, came out of conversation from last meeting about what was being done at Stanford to document student activism via social media, chances are we are all doing it in one form or another, will be a good reminder about what we need to be doing, take time to flesh it out more in the future, will be discussed at SAA Web discussion, request to please send it out again
E. Next Steps – what are some things/areas we should focus on as a group moving forward? Or need more clarity? Suggestion to post deadlines for submitting data, adding more fields to surveys for digital collections
F. Sending out a Doodle Poll for future meetings, and reminder to find out who will be at SAA and meetup, deadline in June; if you feel inspired in any way please share!