The 2018 Upper Midwest Digital Collections Conference (#UMDCC18) will be held on November 8-9th at St. Catherine University campus, St. Paul, Minnesota. The UMDCC provides opportunities for digital collections creators and curators in the region and beyond to network, share best practices, participate in hands-on workshops, and learn from leaders in digital cultural heritage.
Documenting Fandom: The J. R. R. Tolkien Fandom Oral History Collection at Marquette University Marquette University’s J. R. R. Tolkien Collection began with literary manuscripts acquired from the celebrated author in 1957, but it has grown over the past 60 years to document Tolkien scholarship and fandom. Fandom is a challenging phenomenon to document. In 2017 Tolkien Archivist, William Fliss, began building the J. R. R. Tolkien Fandom Oral History Collection, gathering brief testimonials of fans’ love for Tolkien’s works and the ways he has affected their lives. Fliss will introduce the collection, describe his methodology in building it, share plans for its growth and development, and discuss its possible interest to scholars, particularly digital humanists.
Prairie Memories: Building an oral history collection In August 2017, the State Historical Society of North Dakota (SHSND) and Prairie Public Television partnered to document people's Vietnam stories from the North Dakota-Minnesota region. Prairie Public Television would film and edit the oral histories and SHSND would scan pictures, documents, and objects related to their Vietnam stories. Our final project brought the oral histories (as embedded YouTube video) and scanned objects together in Digital Horizons, a CONTENTdm based digital library consortium. Stephanie will outline the project basics and talk about the partnership process.
The Iowa Labor History Oral Project: Revitalizing a Digital Collection for the 21st Century The Iowa Labor History Oral Project (ILHOP) began in the 1970s as a collaboration between the Iowa Federation of Labor, the University of Iowa (UI) Labor Center, and the State Historical Society of Iowa. The project has become an important teaching and research resource on the UI campus and beyond. With over 1,200 oral history interviews recording memories stretching from the 1890s to the first decades of the twenty-first century, ILHOP is a critical resource for Midwestern social history and one of the largest, longest-running labor-focused oral history projects in the world.
Beginning in 2017, the ILHOP team pursued and were awarded two sizable federal grants to modernize and revitalize this project. In the first stage, the interview audiotapes and transcripts were successfully digitized and made publicly available through the UI Libraries’ Iowa Digital Library website. The implementation of this stage required close collaboration and innovative organization between multiple stakeholders. In the second stage, beginning in July 2018, we will complete transcription and indexing of the collection, making available an expandable digital index of the entire project. These two phases open the door to future projects focused on creating educational materials associated with Iowa Labor history, including those which will meet the new Iowa K-12 History standards. All of this work and collaboration will ensure that scholars and the public will be able to connect to and learn from this rich, unique collection well into the future.
