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Sustainability of our Cultural Heritage: Preserving and Making Accessible Society's Digital Records
Archives & Special Collections Month
Throughout October, the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries will celebrate their fifth annual “Archives and Special Collections Month,” as a means of highlighting the many ways that archives and special collections enrich our lives. This year’s theme focuses on IU’s College of Arts and Sciences Themester celebration, “Sustainability: Thriving on a Small Planet.” To highlight the Libraries’ sustainability efforts, the IUB special collection units are hosting the following sessions, tours, and exhibits.
Sessions | Tours | Exhibits
Sessions
"Fear of a Bleak Planet: Rapping About Race, Poverty, and the Environment"
Monday, Oct. 4, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., at the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center—Grand Hall
Speakers
• Dr. Fernando Orejuela is a senior lecturer in IU’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and adjunct faculty in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies. He is currently completing a textbook on hip hop culture to be published by Prentice Hall.
• Dr. Cheryl Keyes, professor of ethnomusicology in the Department of Ethnomusicology at UCLA, is the author of Rap Music and Street Consciousness, which received a CHOICE award for outstanding academic books in 2004.
Description
Presented by the Archives of African American Music and Culture, this panel discussion will examine issues of sustainability—including social and racial equality, economic needs, and environmental racism—through the lens of hip hop. Hip hop is a complex cultural, social, and political movement that emerged during the post-civil rights era when the urban economy was on a steep decline, governmental support programs were being dismantled, drug abuse was on the rise, and violent crime rates reached alarming heights. Out of this increasingly desolate landscape, rap music arose as a voice of protest, offering commentary on the bleak environment and socio-political issues affecting inner-city communities. Over the past 30 years, the movement has grown exponentially.
"‘Who Wants [Their Facebook Posts] to Live Forever’"
Wednesday, Oct. 6, from 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., at Wells Library, room E174
Speakers
• Beth Cate, associate general counsel at Indiana University
• Dina Kellams, IU associate archivist
• Kalpana Shankar, assistant professor at the IU School of Informatics and Computing
Description
People generate countless communications through social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, newspaper comment forums, etc. This material could well be a treasure trove for social historians and researchers in many disciplines, and many archivists recommend that these communications be captured, preserved, and made accessible. However, these comments and images can also be a treasure trove of data for employment background checks and general snooping about individuals.
In this session, Cate will discuss the legal issues related to accessing this material and, more specifically, address the following questions: Should the law limit how much we may save, access, and use this material? Does it do so already, and if so, does it currently strike the right balance between protecting personal privacy and making information widely available for a variety of socially useful purposes? Does the law actually require that these communications be stored and available for a certain time or certain purposes? Shankar will discuss the research potential of this material and address the following questions: Why should anyone care if we save this material? Why is this information useful, and to whom? Kellams will examine the challenges of capturing, preserving, and making this material accessible. As part of this discussion, Dina will demonstrate the use of a tool Archives is using to preserve IU Web sites.
"Are We Losing Our Identity? Preserving and Making Accessible Electronic Records at our State and University Archives"
Friday, Oct. 15, from 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., at the Black Film Center/Archive, Wells Library, room 044
Speakers
• Philip Bantin, IU archivist
• Geoffrey Brown, professor in the IU School of Informatics and Computing
• James Corridan, Indiana State archivist
Description
Are government and universities preserving the digital records that provide evidence of our rights and entitlements, of our very identity, as citizens and members of the IU community? Are these institutions preserving those digital records that will allow us to hold them accountable for their actions?
In this session, two archivists and a scholar will address these questions. Corridan will discuss the challenges of preserving essential digital records at the state level and will demonstrate the use of the new State Records Repository. Bantin will review activities to preserve IU records with long-term value and will demonstrate the use of the Archives of Institutional Memory (AIM), a repository for digital records. Finally, Brown will discuss two aspects of his research on digital preservation—the creation of a networked archive of the approximately 5,000 CD-ROMs published by the U.S. Government Printing Office and the development of emulation technologies to provide scholars with ready access to digital content.
"Preserving Home Movies"
Sunday, Oct. 17, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., in the Fine Arts Building, Auditorium
Speaker
• James Paasche, graduate student in the Department of Communication and Culture
Description
Home Movie Day is an international event celebrating the cultural and historical value of home movies and amateur cinema. Now in its eighth year, Home Movie Day invites the public to bring in their private films and share them with the community. This is IU’s third year hosting Home Movie Day in Bloomington, and it promises to be the biggest one yet. We will feature films from the various archives on the Indiana University campus. We will also be screening your films, with projection available for 16mm, 8mm, Super 8, VHS, and DVD. Bring your family and share your history with new friends. Home Movie Day will also feature discussions about film preservation and digitization.
"‘The Times They Are A-Changin’: Preservation of and Access to the Digital Output of Researchers"
Tuesday, Oct. 19, from 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., at Wells Library, room E174
Speakers
• Jennifer Laherty, Digital Publishing librarian for IUScholarWorks
• Robert McDonald, associate dean for IU Library Technologies and Digital Libraries
• Dot Porter, associate director for IU Digital Library Content and Services
Description
IU has developed a number of strategies for dealing with the digital scholarly output of IU faculty. In this session, information managers will outline these strategies and discuss plans for the future. Laherty will discuss the IUScholarWorks program which aims to make the digital output of IU scholars available and to ensure that these resources are archived, preserved and organized for the future. In this presentation, Laherty will briefly demonstrate IUScholarWorks services and explain its benefits, including the strategies for preserving records. Porter will examine the various ways that the Digital Library Program supports the preservation of faculty scholarship in the broad sense and will examine in more detail a few specific faculty-led projects the DLP has supported in the past. In addition, she will review DLP’s participation in initiatives throughout the Libraries and across campus that support preservation of digital work through shared file formats, best practices, and shared infrastructure and technologies. Finally, McDonald will review IU’s plans for research data curation and management.
"A Celebration of World Day for Audiovisual Heritage: Announcing the IUB Media Preservation Initiative"
Wednesday, Oct. 27, from 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., at Wells Library, room E174
Speakers
• Alan Burdette, director of the IU Archives of Traditional Music
• Mike Casey, associate director for recording services at the IU Archives of Traditional Music
• Jon Dunn, director of the IU Digital Library Program
• Rachael Stoeltje, film archivist for the IU Libraries
Description
The Bloomington campus of Indiana University is home to more than half a million audio, video, and film recordings, many of which are historically and culturally significant. In October 2009, IU became the first university in the country to conduct a comprehensive survey of its media holdings, identifying more than 560,000 recordings and reels of motion picture film stored on campus.
More than 40 percent of these recordings are unique or rare and include Orson Wells Mercury Theatre radio programs; Native American music from the 1890s; IU basketball games from the 1940s; home movies of Hoagy Carmichael; early concerts by world famous performers like Joshua Bell and Janos Starker; original films by D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, and Peter Bogdanovich; and interviews with Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and Quincy Jones.
These recordings and thousands more exist on media formats that are at serious risk for content loss. IU has embarked on a media preservation planning initiative to create a solution for the long-term preservation of and greater access to these valuable holdings. This special session, coinciding with World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, will serve as the public launch of IU’s Media Preservation Initiative and will feature presentations that highlight IUB’s media holdings and discuss the planning phase of the initiative.
Tours
"ALF and ALF 2"
Monday, Oct. 25 and Friday, Oct. 29 from 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. at the Auxiliary Library Facility, 851 North Range Road
Description of Tour
The Ruth Lilly Auxiliary Library Facility (ALF) is home to 2.2 million rare, fragile, and valuable books, manuscripts, and films representing approximately 30 percent of the print collections owned by the IU Bloomington Libraries. The current capacity of the facility is between five and six million items. The materials are stored in a highly-secure collections vault with a pristine preservation environment that features constant temperature and humidity controls, adding as many as 200 to 300 years to the lifetime of paper materials.
Exhibits
"Straw Leaves, Table-Bugs, and Birch-Bark Poems: Sustainability at the Lilly"
Sept. 1–Oct. 11 at the Lilly Library
Description
This exhibit is curated by IU English professor Christoph Irmscher and is a loosely chronological look at some of the highlights of sustainable thinking during the last 200 years. It also addresses more general topics, such as the relationship between book-making and the environment and the increasing regard modern writers commenting about the environment have shown for younger audiences.
"Nature and Nurture: Exploring Human Reproduction from Pregnancy through Early Childhood"
Sept. 10–Dec. 22 at the Kinsey Institute Gallery
Description
Nature and Nurture is the first exhibition from the Kinsey Institute to highlight its collection of fine art, books, and special collection materials on the subject of human reproduction. The exhibition uses fine art photographs, paintings, print, sculptures, and books to illustrate pregnancy, birth, child rearing, development of gender identity, and parent/child relationships.
"African Reinventions: Reused Materials in Popular Culture"
Sept. 25–Dec. 19 at the IU Art Museum Special Exhibitions Gallery, The Judi and Milt Stewart Hexagon Gallery, first floor
Description
Plastic bags, aluminum cans, wire, and scraps of wood, cloth, metal, and plastic are given second lives throughout sub-Saharan Africa when they are transformed into lamps, jewelry, toys, tourist souvenirs, and a variety of other utilitarian and decorative items. With objects including a working radio, a movie poster painted on an old flour sack, and a menagerie of animals made out of cans and wire, African Reinventions presents an engaging assortment of creative uses of recycled materials.
"Fear of a Bleak Planet: Hip Hop’s Response to Race, Poverty, and the Environment"
Oct. 4–31 in the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center, Bridgwaters Lounge
Description
This exhibit examines issues of sustainability—including social and racial equality, economic needs, and environmental racism—through the lens of hip hop. Hip hop is a complex cultural, social, and political movement that emerged during the post-civil rights era when the urban economy was on a steep decline, governmental support programs were being dismantled, drug abuse was on the rise, and violent crime rates reached alarming heights. Out of this increasingly desolate landscape, rap music arose as a voice of protest offering commentary on the bleak environment and socio-political issues affecting inner-city communities. Over the past 30 years, the movement has grown exponentially.
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