Meredith Evans, President Elect of the Society of American Archivists, was the keynote speaker at the Cambridge Libraries Conference 2018. She spoke about library projects that have gathered together material about significant events during or soon after those events have taken place. She showed the film about the project Documenting Ferguson, http://digital.wustl.edu/ferguson/ where a library provided a community hub during a period of protests against the police shooting of local black youth Michael Brown. The library remained open at a time when the schools, the church and many of the shops remained shut. At the library local activists organised babysitting services and food for children whose parents were at work and who could not attend school. The local libraries, including the nearby Washington University Library in St Louis, provided a facility for anyone to upload material onto a central depository. Many Tweets, photos and videos were uploaded along with some surprise items such as music.
The project was an innovation because usually archivists only create archives from donations after a significant person retires, but this collection was current and gave the University raw resources on which to research and update their teaching curriculum. The project improved the links between the University and the community and affected the intake and nature of the University itself.
This was an instance where library staff took responsibility for a new and unexpected area of work, in reaction to new needs raised by new circumstances. I have been struck more and more recently at how most of the time people are only really interested with following their own agendas and are very reluctant to jetison their short time preconceived goals and activities to adjust to new needs or the agendas of others with the aim of achieving a long term good: in this case addressing the needs of the local community during a crisis, acknowledging that this community were in posession of valuable material that would be of great value to future researchers and having the will to co-operate with funders and partners to address and achieve this aim.
We also learned how they did that, in case anyone else is thinking of doing this specific thing. They used the program Omeka. They gathered as much metadata as they could, even though this was hardly any (email addresses). Simlar projects include the Katrina and September 11 archives and the Boston bombing archives.
Thinking about these issues I realised that the things that Universities collect are often out of date. When I take photographs I often think I am preserving things for the future but recently I have been looking back through a lot of old photographs from my Uncle's life and realising that now my Uncle has died, a lot of these photos have little significance for anyone. Our current obsession with taking photographs panders to our current psychological need to make sense of our present and is often of more benefit to us currently and in the next few years than it will be at any future date. By the time someone has the grace to die and bequeathe their work, that work may well have lost its value. Bring on OpenData repositories is all I can say!
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