#s5b

Pamela Mitchem and Dea Rice (Appalachian State University)

Appalachian State University is a regional comprehensive university serving over 17,000 students and employing close to 900 faculty. The Carol Grotnes Belk Library and Information Commons endeavors to cultivate an environment where people discover, create and share information that reflects the acquisition of 21st century knowledge and skills. We are active partners in advancing the University’s principles of sustainability, social justice, inclusion, and global citizenship. The library’s newly developed Digital Scholarship and Initiatives (DSI) team began serving the university on July 1, 2015. Our team is dedicated to fostering the creation, dissemination, and preservation of digital scholarship and digital objects.

One of our main initiatives is creating sustainable partnerships with local cultural heritage organizations to build digital collections related to the culture and history of southern Appalachia. Using Omeka, an open source content management software, we are helping our historical societies, museums, local libraries, and school alumni associations to create digital collections of their historical materials. We use Omeka content management software for Appalachian’s Special Collections materials as well. We also helped create the Digital Library of Southern Appalachia Web Portal to promote these collections. Some of our projects include:

Blowing Rock History Project—A collaborative project with Blowing Rock Historical Society and Blowing Rock Art & History Museum. DSI provided consultation and training on Omeka software and will be writing a collaborative grant to digitize Blowing Rock related materials.

Digital History Class–DSI worked with the history department to provide training to students on Omeka for their Digital History class. These students then created Omeka collections for three local cultural organizations. One of those organizations was Lincoln Heights Recreation Committee. Lincoln Heights is a large Rosenwald school for African Americans in Wilkesboro, NC. Open from 1924-­68, Lincoln Heights educated and employed black southerners through the Jim Crow Era and the height of the 20th-century Civil Rights Movement.

Digital Watauga Project-We are collaborating to provide Omeka training and digitization support to the Digital Watauga project, which is funded by Library Services and Technology ACT (LSTA) to digitize historical documents and images donated by community members.

This presentation will present a case study of our collaborations and use of Omeka. We will discuss strategies for partnerships, the challenges and rewards to cultivating these important relationships, and lessons learned in the process. We will also discuss our training module for Omeka.

Pam Mitchem has been a professional archivist for 18 years, working in digitization and digital curation since 2000.  She held positions as Preservation and Digital Projects Archivist, Interim University Archivist, and Special Assistant to the Dean of Libraries for Digital Initiatives. Mitchem earned an M.A. in Appalachian studies from Appalachian State University and an Ed.S. in leadership and higher education, also from Appalachian. She is a certified archivist (CA) with the Academy of Certified Archivists and is a Society of American Archivists certified digital archives specialist (DAS). She is at work on her post-masters certificate in data curation at UNC-Chapel Hill and now serves as the Coordinator of Digital Scholarship and Initiatives services at the Appalachian State University Libraries.

Dea Rice is the Digital Projects Librarian at Appalachian State University and has also served as Metadata Librarian and Catalog Librarian. She received her M.S. in Information Sciences from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her research interests include social media, socially responsible subject analysis and cataloging, and the intersection of gender and technology. She is currently working on a post-graduate certificate in Data Curation from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Amy Rogers and Lynn Estomin (Lycoming College)

During the spring 2016 semester, two professors from diverse educational backgrounds, a group of freshmen from all over the United States, and 15 African American community members from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, came together to create a digital archive of stories documenting the history of the Black community of Lycoming County.

Digital storytelling is a specific process combining storytelling with modern-day technology and digital media based on participants’ own experiences and told through their own perspectives. Participants’ voices are recorded and integrated with photographs, letters, home videos, etc. The stories focus on the point of view/voice of the storyteller and value the power of story as a tool for self-discovery and reflection, community building and education, organizing and advocacy.

Through this interactive presentation, we will demonstrate how we used digital storytelling to increase knowledge and understanding of this mainly undocumented community history. The presenters will share the process used in this collaborative project.  We will talk about some of the challenges presented by the project, as well as the successful outcome — the creation of digitalized stories of the life stories of members of the diverse African American community. The final stories were presented at a public screening and will be available to the public through the Lycoming County Historical Society, the Lycoming County Women’s History Collection and the Heart of Williamsport Project.

The presenters will discuss the value of a first year seminar that connects students from Lycoming College to the local community.  The relationships formed between the Lycoming College students and their community members were lifelong partnerships, as shared by a student and her community partner who will share their story as part of our presentation.  The first year seminar course had three main parts — creation of the student’s own digital stories, learning about the history of Lycoming County and its African American community, and the collaborative effort by students and community member teams to create a series of historical stories about the local Black community.   Community members shared photographs, correspondence, diaries, scrapbooks, newspaper stories, and in some instances, rare secondary sources and students created 3-5 minute digital stories about some aspect of their partners’ lives and community.

Lynn Estomin, Professor of Art and Women’s and Gender Studies at Lycoming College, teaches graphic design, digital imaging, web design, and interactive media. Estomin is a videographer, photographer and interactive media artist who creates art that speaks to social issues. Her award-winning video documentaries have been broadcast internationally and nationally on PBS and exhibited internationally at film festivals, including Ajijic Festival Internacional de Cine Mexico, St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival in Canada, Barcelona Human Rights Film Festival, and  American Film Institute (AFI) National Video Festival. Her still photography and digital images have been exhibited nationally solo and group exhibitions. Her Interactive art has won awards from The Webby Awards, Adobe Corporation, Canadian Web Awards, SXSW Interactive Festival and Golden Web Awards. Her work is part of numerous public and private collections. Estomin has received grants and fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Art Matters Inc., Cincinnati Commission on the Arts, Kodak Corporation, Ilford Corporation, Sony Corporation, SIGGRAPH, the Luce Foundation and Women’s Film Project.

Amy Rogers, a professor in the Education Department, has been teaching at Lycoming College since 2007. She earned her B.A. at Lycoming College, received her M.A. from Bloomsburg University, and earned her Ph.D. at Pennsylvania State University. Rogers studied the effects of local history in relation to a student’s level of civic mindedness and civic engagement. Her research areas include teacher leadership, pre-service teacher education, civic education, civic engagement, and place based education.  Responsible for the Secondary Teacher Education Program and Teacher Certification Program, Rogers teaches courses and is an advisor to education students seeking middle and/or secondary certification, and teaches courses on digital storytelling and English Language Learning.  She serves on the board of directors to the Pennsylvania Association of College and Teacher Educators (PAC-TE) and the East Lycoming School District.

Local Black Community Digital Stories

Jennie Levine Knies (Penn State Wilkes-Barre) and Melissa R. Meade (Temple University)

In 2013, Temple University PhD candidate Melissa R. Meade started a Facebook page for the Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania, to share and curate material relevant to her community-based ethnographic dissertation project. The page has evolved into a place in which community members meet and gather digitally to reflect upon history, memories, culture, and media of the greater Anthracite Region. While Facebook practically serves as an excellent platform for communication, it is not symbiotic for necessary cataloging, searching, and archiving of information. The Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania is a work in progress with endless possibilities. For this talk, we intend to focus on a description of the Facebook page and community, and discuss our attempts to extract data, our ideas of how we might use that data to further scholarship and understanding of the history of the region, and discuss challenges in bridging these divides.

Jennie Levine Knies is the Head Librarian at Penn State, Wilkes-Barre. Prior, she was Manager of Digital Programs and Initiatives at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she supervised the digital repositories and was a principle investigator for Maryland’s National Digital Newspaper Program grant.  She received her MLS from the University of Maryland, with a concentration in archives. She has written papers discussing collaboration with faculty, and has participated in numerous Digital Humanities projects.

Melissa R. Meade’s ethnographic fieldwork in the Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania focuses on the lived experiences of economic and social change, including deindustrialization. She is a Ph.D. candidate at Temple University in Media and Communication and holds a Master’s degree in Intercultural Communication from the University of Pennsylvania. Her article “In the Shadow of the Coal Breaker: Cultural Extraction and Digital Dialogical Communication in the Anthracite Coal Mining Region” (in press) appears in a forthcoming issue of Cultural Studies.