Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Cultural heritage collections can reflect societal biases and sometimes leave out important stories. As studies show visitors invest significant trust in the information cultural organizations provide, it is critical we examine what we share online especially as researchers bring more sophisticated tools to bare. This panel will examine two projects as they work to create a diverse American history online; The Smithsonian American Women’s Initiative and The LGBTQ Digital History Project.

In 2017, the ONE Archives Foundation and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) launched a partnership to develop an open source digital platform connecting LGBTQ archives and community collections from across the nation, with the ultimate goal of developing a collaborative digital framework for documenting and sharing LGBTQ history. The Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative (AWHI), launched in 2017, has a key goal of telling a more complete American women’s history to include more stories of women from multiple cultural and gender-identification backgrounds. With the call from U.S. Congress to survey its 155 million collections for women’s history stories, what are the steps it will take to improve representation when only 150,000 of the over 40 million digital records are explicitly tagged with women-related topics?

Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration)

TrackContent
Chatham House RuleNo

Key Outcomes

Participants will gain an awareness around what their digital collections represent, how they contribute to representation online, as well as some of the tools and processes they can leverage to represent a more diverse history.

Speakers

Session Leader : Effie Kapsalis, Senior Digital Program Officer, Smithsonian Institution

Co-Presenter : Sherri Berger, Head of Digital Programs, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian National Museum of American History

Co-Presenter : Darren Milligan, Senior Digital Strategist, Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access

Co-Presenter : Robert Horton, Assistant Director, Collections and Archives, National Museum of American History