Left: Old storage location for The Clippers. Right: Old storage for the EvCC yearbooks.
It took seven years to start this project. Thankfully, as a result of the college's 75th anniversary, concern for the condition of historic campus materials received new momentum. Although physical preservation materials have been secured for the EvCC Yearbooks and The Clippers, keeping momentum for digital preservation activities is key as original materials will continue to degrade.
As such, the LMC has submitted a 2019-2021 iMLS grant application to continue work on the digitization initiative. In the odd event we don’t receive this grant, we have a “back-up” application to the 2019-2020 WSL Digital Heritage. The goal of these follow-up grants is to continue digital preservation work on historic college materials by initiating the scanning of The Clipper, EvCC's student newspaper. These high-risk back issues are in poor condition and are in danger of being lost forever as 46% are held as a single copy!
Digital preservation activities will be planned and implemented in ways that best manage current college resources and can be sustained into the future. However, future access to digital resources cannot be assured without commitment from the institution to necessary resources. Currently, the LMC has not secured funds to support a subscription to the digital asset management system required to host and make discoverable online digitized historic materials. Furthermore, there is not yet institutional support for ongoing training and development of staff in areas related to digital preservation. Securing this institutional support is vital in ensuring the success of digital preservation initiatives on campus.
Beyond local resources, the LMC intends to coordinate and collaborate with the Everett Public Library's Northwest Room, and the Everett History Museum, on ways to advertise and make historic content visible and accessible at a regional level. Our first meeting is set for June 26th, 2019. Additionally, we look forward to sharing our project with EvCC students, staff, and faculty by posting our final report through institutional channels. We look forward to sharing with our peers in the Washington State Community and technical college system.
A future goal is to have a concise controlled vocabulary associated with the Yearbook and Clipper collections. This collection specific vocabulary will permit beginning level catalogers, like work-study students, to enrich object with additional description without the complications of exhaustive descriptive vocabularies like those available thru Classification Web. This requires further analysis of these collections to identify a short list. This refined shortlist will also support more consistent retrieval of relevant local topics for researchers.
Test cataloging was an eye-opening experience that resulted in all the expected frustrations and discoveries a work unit experiences when starting out with new software and unclear workflows. We still have many questions and points of confusion, as is to be expected during a pilot project. More training and experimentation is needed, in particular to:
Notes from Lauren:
EvCC would benefit from creating a secure, combined space for archival processing and cataloging. This would help ensure the safety of special collections items and limit the need to frequently move potentially delicate items. That said, a storage space that conforms to environmental best practices is more important at this point as the collection spends most of the time in storage.
Notes from Heather:
Building on Lauren’s note, I am happy to share that in the next few years EvCC will be building a Learning Resource Center, which will house several student success services in one three story structure, including the library. The LRC currently includes 500 square feet of climate controlled space to be used for Special Collections and sensitive storage of materials like The Clippers and the EvCC yearbooks.
Notes from Heather:
As the pilot team reviewed the EvCC yearbooks, we were amazed by the level of diversity present in our past student population. In order to make this diversity visible, and researchable by current and future scholars, our pilot team intends to begin drafting a policy that will guide how we catalog identities and identity-related issues/initiatives.
The goal of the diversity initiative is to ensure that we represent identity communities in a respectful manner that invites input/collaboration rather than imposing unvetted descriptive language.
On April 29th, 2019, the pilot team met with the EvCC Diversity & Equity team to discuss this initiative. A vibrant and eye-opening conversation took place. Particularly around the challenge of “naming” a passed person when we have no way of confirming from their perspective how they prefer to identify.
One idea that was proposed by the pilot team was the use of a general heading such as “People of Color” that would allow researchers to find moments documenting identity communities, but then that researcher would be required to do the additional work necessary to further uncover a shaping idea of identify. There was discussion of creating a start page through CONTENTdm that explains the initiative and this practice, as a first step toward guiding the researcher to understanding why naming practices are complicated ever-evolving initiatives that need the flexibility to grow with communities rather than being imposed upon communities.
More research into this proposed best practices is needed, as is conversations with identity communities in Snohomish County.
Directly applicable to this work is The 5 Dimension of Equity. EvCC has developed its 5 Dimensions of Equity: aspiration, access, achievement, economic progress, and engagement. This project has amazing potential to showcase to highlight and re-examine the diversity of a red-lined community.[1] Reflecting the voices of many, the 5 dimensions of Equity are designed to:
Source: EvCC 5 Dimension of Equity Draft 8-10-2018
Notes from Paloma:
The initial stages of this project have shown a diversity in Everett’s history that had been all but forgotten or erased. In addition to this, reexamining the role this institution has attempted to affect in redefining and redeveloping equitable Everett following the Wartime internment mindset of World War II will highlight the inclusive spirit that first formed this town.
The images found in this yearbook show the equitable side of Everett that is often overlooked; the side of Everett that may mis-step and faux pas from time to time, but has always been on the forefront of striving to provide access and support to all community members willing and able to put in the work. Digitizing these materials has opened up new avenues in with which to engage such delicate topics as racism, immigration and internment, sexism, classicism, climate change, and numerous LGBTQA+ issues through past dances, events, guest speakers, etc. Finding ways to use and engage with these materials responsibly gives EvCC a unique opportunity to engage contentious issues by depersonalizing through the lens of time while keeping them contextualized in the frame of the College campus.
This isn’t going to be an easy process.
Notes from Lauren:
In reviewing best practices, it was discovered that the library, and the special collections specifically, does not have a space specific emergency plan. The importance of such a policy cannot be emphasized enough. Having been through a records emergency at a previous job, I am especially sensitive to this issue. A document outlining in the case of an emergency what the priority items are, what needs to be done, and who handles these responsibilities will prevent adding further aggravation to an already stressful event. Additionally, keeping clean up items on site is important as time is of the essence in an emergency.
In my opinion, plans like this should be reviewed on a yearly basis to ensure that personnel and procedures are still applicable. Have personnel titles changed? Has there been any staff turnover? Are new staff adequately trained for their emergency responsibilities? Is the floor plan different? Are your cleanup vendors still in business? Additionally, a current inventory of emergency supplies should be maintained and supplies refreshed as needed.
Notes from Heather:
Our first attempts at working with the CONTENTdm project client resulted in a bit of culture shock. Projects are locked to a single user and software instance. For those of us used to the share edit experience of Google Docs, which allows simultaneous editing and easy transfer to another station, this change took a bit of adjustment. As such, if you’re working with large compound objects that require lots of staff time, you will need a dedicated workstation for each project member.
Notes from Lauren:
In response to Heather's comment, it is possible to work cooperatively on a metadata cataloging project by entering the metadata into an Excel spreadsheet. CONTENTdm allows for a tab delimited text file of metadata to be uploaded by crosswalking the column titles with the field names in the Project Client. This means that cataloging can be done by anyone who has access to Excel, or possibly even a Google Sheet, providing it can be properly converted to the correct file type.
Another thing we discovered is that there can be a delay with the server refresh rate in both CONTENTdm applications. One situation we confronted was with records that had been deleted but were not fully removed from the Administration site creating “ghost” records. Heather reached out to Shane and he shared the following advice:
“There are some situations where the CONTENTdm collection data can get out of sync with the live search index. Possible causes are a deletion process failing before it finishes or the manual re-ordering of pages that fails to index fully. … When/if you see this kind of ghost record, you can ask our tech support team to run a ‘full index build’ for you. This is a process that completely wipes out the live search index for that collection and then builds it back up from the data files. That nearly always corrects the ghosting problem.”
Source: email communication June 3, 2019
Notes from Paloma:
[1] Western Washington was subjected to a policy known as “redlining” that officially ended with the Fair Housing Act, unofficially ended in 1992 when amendments were made to the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act that prevented banks from denying home loans based on ethnicity or gender in certain areas.