- Well, hello everyone from Austin, Texas
and thank you for joining us today.
Welcome to our webinar with the Texas Oral History Association.
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our conference planner and Administrative Associate, Alex Suarez.
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Now, on the show.
Today's presenters are Jena Heath,
Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities,
Associate Professor of Journalism and digital media and coordinator of
journalism and digital media program at St. Edward's University,
and Megan Firestone is the head of
special collections and archives at Southwestern University.
Jena and Megan are going to present on strategies to bridge
the gaps between the archivists and oral historians.
I'm going to launch a quick poll so we can learn a little bit about you.
As I'm doing that, Jena will stop sharing your screen and turn
things over to you.
Go ahead and launch that poll.
We'd love to know a bit about you.
Tell us about your role in the library or on your campus.
You can select as many as apply. This is anonymous.
We just wanted to get a sense of who's out there with us today.
I'll let the pole run for
another probably 30 seconds and then share the results.
This is good. Let us split mostly between archivists and librarians.
I'm going to go ahead and pull.
It's like most everyone had a chance to take it,
and I'll share the results.
Over to you, Jena.
- Is Alex advancing the slides?
Yeah. I am Jena Heath and I'm a relatively new oral historian.
I started this project as part of my sabbatical in 2015, 2016.
We can move ahead. Here we go.
My project is called Our China Stories
and it focuses on the stories of adoptees from China.
I did about a 100 interviews the projects ongoing,
but I have this really robust amount of time obviously during that year to
travel and to interview people really
from not only the United States but also in some other countries.
In the course of this work,
I collaborated with my colleague here, Megan Firestone,
who was then at St. Edward's University
and we're going to talk both
of us a little bit about how that collaboration worked.
I will say just to start it off that I was
completely and be a fight when he came to collaborating.
This was with library staff and within archivists and it was
such a wonderful experience that Megan and I continue
to collaborate (laughter) even though we're now at different institutions.
We worked together on an NEH grant application
for digital preservation and archiving of the collection,
which we didn't get but got relatively far in
terms of encouragement from NEH and that led me
to a further collaboration and getting to know a couple of the people
at UNT libraries and
the collection is also up on the portal to Texas history there,
and we'll talk more about that as we go on.
Next slide please.
- Hi, I'm Megan Firestone.
I'm head of special collections and archives at Southwestern University.
I started here in January of 2019.
Prior to this position,
I was at St. Ed's with Jena where I was the special collections librarian,
and then I've also been an archivist at Myriad RBM,
which if you're not familiar with it,
it is a biotech firm and then I was also an Air Force historian.
Something Jena and I wanted to talk about is,
when you collaborate sometimes or you work on a campus or anywhere,
you may not be aware of everybody's backgrounds.
For example, when Jena met with me,
she didn't really know that I was also a trained oral historian.
I have an MA in public history,
which includes training in oral history.
I was trained by a great oral historian, Dan Lee,
which I know some people will know and
so I've done oral histories for the Air Force.
When I worked at Tarlton Law Library,
I did oral histories,
so I have a great love affair of oral histories.
That was helpful in our collaboration is having that background.
But we'll talk a little bit more about where
archivists and librarians can come in to help with projects.
Next slide, please,
or also launch the poll.
I think I launched the poll.
- Here we go.
- Couple more seconds.
I'm in the poll.
Looks like most are evenly split
between worked on and assisted.
All you, Jena.
- The way we met was that I started working on this project,
was approved in the sabbatical and
really this was my introduction to oral history.
Before I entered academia in 2008,
I was a working journalist for 20 years.
I was a reporter and editor,
so I had a lot of experience with interviewing obviously and
encountering new people and talking to people about their stories.
I really had to learn through training
and an exposure to colleagues with expertise obviously,
that oral history interviewing is different and to really
think about and understand better the craft of an art of oral history.
I am so taken with it and I think I hope have developed some facility with it.
Actually now I'm the board member at the Texas Oral History Association.
This project and this collaboration led to a lot
of satisfying and interesting
things that I hadn't anticipated in the first place.
The collection, as I said,
features interviews with 100 adoptees from China.
Their families, if they wanted,
if the adoptees wanted their families involved,
they were and in one case,
a birth mother who I interviewed using
WeChat messaging app in China and whose identity is obscured,
all the subjects in this project have the option of using
middle names or not being identified by name or not having photos,
whatever they want or don't want is up to them in terms
of the identifying information that's included in the project.
There are photos, videos and written narratives
by the adoptees, also transcripts.
When you go on to the Our China's Story site,
you can read the transcript,
you can listen to the interview,
you can watch the video really,
or whatever you really want to do.
Next slide please. This is the team,
I realized I was going to need a team when
I started and I reached out to Megan,
and Megan is going to have to remind me about our initial conversation.
I learned, and I feel naive saying this,
that we had so much expertise at the library.
Megan's archival experience, and
then the added benefit of her training in oral history.
The designer who designed the Omeka site,
Marcos Hernandez, I did very minimal editing.
The oral historians here will know that there's no editing policy.
We really just cleaned up when things were
distorted and Matt Largey, from KUT,
some of you may be may know Matt is
a project's editor and a wonderful audio journalistic at KUT.
A freelance photographer came with me to take pictures,
some of the photos were provided by subjects.
We had a translator who's a colleague, Shanshan Zhang,
who is at Shanghai University,
she did translation of interviews with people in China.
My Mandarin is very rudimentary,
(laughter) so when people didn't speak English,
Shanshan helped, and then,
of course, met Jake Mangum at UNT at the digital library
there as we moved along with the NEH grant application.
Actually the Program Officer at NEH pointed me to the
portal to Texas history and to the work at UNT,
so this is how the team developed.
Next slide, please.
This is what the site looks like,
this is just a screenshot of what you see when you land.
Next slide, please. Participants, usually I would go to people's homes,
Steph Campos the photographer would come with me, obviously,
if people were interested in having photos with their stories.
I interviewed international participants in Barcelona,
Australia, China, China not Skype,
but in other countries by Skype,
and I continued to collect oral histories as
the site also allows adoptees to upload their own stories.
If they want to just do this,
they can do it themselves.
I get a notification and then I can take a look at the story,
contact the storyteller, talk about consent forms and all of that.
I tried as much as possible in this to be
a facilitator and to make the storytelling as direct as
possible by the people who are telling the stories without getting in the way.
Next slide, please.
I thought I'd show you a couple of just snippets here.
These two young women,
Celena Kopinski and Sarah Heath,
who is not related to me so far as we know.
After their story appeared on Our China stories and a while later,
Celena's mom got in touch and said,
"You got to turn on CBS Sunday morning,
the girls are on CBS Sunday morning," And it was on a story about twins and
theirs was featured as a story about twins who were separated,
which is common in the adoption system,
the International Adoption System in China,
which is not something we
knew or really I understood until I got into doing this work.
I should say that my initial interest in the subject was fueled.
I am the mother of a daughter who was born in China and adopted from China.
She helps me a lot with the project, she's 15 now.
One of the things I learned as I was going through is
that often twins were separated and
sent to different families internationally without the families being told,
without anyone understanding this.
There is a lot of work going on now,
a lot of connecting on social media around DNA.
We have people like Celena and Sarah who found each other through DNA testing.
Next slide, please.
Sarah grew up in Nashville,
Celena grew up in New York City.
It turns out through the sheer happenstance of life,
which constantly is hitting me in the face as I do this project that
Celena's parents and I have very close mutual friend, it's a lot of thing.
Sarah went to Georgetown,
Celena went to Case Western.
They were mistaken for one another basically.
At Georgetown, a friend of Celena from home spotted Sarah
online when she was registering for
a class and thought he was seeing his old childhood friend,
and set in motion this whole series of events that ultimately led to the two
contacting each other by Facebook Messenger and agreeing
to have DNA tests and found that they are sister.
The oral history is linked here,
there's quite a long conversation and there's a YouTube video,
and you can listen to them talk about what this experience has been like.
They're in their twenties and they're getting to know each other now.
Next slide, please.
This is the story of Willa Mei Kurland.
Willa Mei Kurland and Charlotte Cotter met in
an adaptee conference a couple of years before they decided to spend
a summer traveling to China and seeing
if they couldn't find birth parents or birth relatives.
They didn't have much hope that they would,
but they thought they would try.
Charlotte went to Yale and studied Mandarin and is fluent in Mandarin.
Willa grew up in the Bay Area
and they travel together and got in touch with me.
They heard about my project through
these very extensive adoptee social media networks
and I've been really active with the project on social media,
so that's a whole other conversation here.
They got in touch with me,
and they said we want to document our story on our China's stories,
is that okay with you as it's happening?
I said, "Sure, great."
I was in Seattle on a week-long vacation with my family,
Willa and Charlotte had not even left the country yet.
Willa got in touch with me to tell me that she thinks they had found her foster
parents by posting information about her finding date and time,
and some of the information in
her adoption documents and photographs on Chinese social media.
In fact, that did turn out to lead her to the couple that fostered her.
This is sometimes common in areas where there
isn't a big adoption orphanage system,
you're with a foster family.
Willa and Charlotte met the foster family,
these are people who took care of Willa for the first year of life.
We found out later in
the course of all this is all documented in the collection,
wanted to adopt her, they very,
very intent on adopting her,
and tried to hide her from the family planning officials
before her adoptive parents could get to China.
The international adoption was already in motion
and they were threatened with prosecution if they did not relinquish Willa.
Willa learned all of this in the course of this trip,
her foster mother provided the documentation and the copy of the legal notice.
I thought you might want to hear
a little bit of their reunion if we could play that.
- Charlotte is translating and she's shooting too.
- This is baba.
- (speaking Chinese)
-This is dad, this baba,
is what her foster mom is saying to her.
- (speaking Chinese) (laughter)
- Next slide, please.
I'll move quickly so we can get to collaboration.
I built this site initially,
part of the team was an undergraduate,
a student at UT who was in the journalism program there but got
interested in computers and who
had a real talent with coding and with building.
A colleague of mine recommended him.
Initially, we built a site.
He built it, Miles built it.
Miles graduated and works at Google now.
He's going to run the world while I'm still what they call a professor,
(laughter) but I'm glad I got a little moment of his time.
The site was fine as long as it went until it got,
the images were hosted by Amazon got hacked,
so I was suddenly dealing with technical problems.
I'm pretty good with this stuff,
but I really didn't have the time or the resources to unwind,
and I knew that I needed institutional support.
I said goodbye to the site and started to work with Marco Hernandez, who,
unfortunately, isn't at St. Edward's anymore,
recently went to a computer job for a health care outfit.
But he built the Omeka collection,
and I should say, this was my introduction to Omeka.
Here you have these professor people,
some of whom have a lot of understanding of what goes on over
there at the library (laughter) and some of whom really need an education.
This entire experience has been a wonderful education for me.
I have to say that I could not be doing this project.
It is a full collaboration with archiving and
with the talents and skills of people who do
digital library work and I am a huge proponent
of more support for digital library work at universities.
I now understand how to use Omeka.
I have some facility with it.
I can help manage the back end a little bit.
Of course, the collections are also on the Portal to Texas History,
which I'm very grateful to UNT libraries for. Next slide, please.
This is what it looks like on the portal.
The portal has oral histories,
I'm sure as you all know.
It's great that people can find it there.
Next slide, please.
Here's a little bit about the portal,
if you're not familiar with it.
I'm such a huge fan.
I think it's wonderful.
Then at a TOHA conference,
I heard more about the portal and I learned more about it,
and I was even more excited about it.
Omeka is a lot less difficult than I thought it would be.
I'm going to look at questions in a minute,
and I'm going to let Megan talk about the mechanics of Omeka,
but for me as a non-trained person,
I do teach digital stuff all the time in journalism,
in digital media work,
I've been working with digital tools for technologies for years,
but it's really not hard to learn.
Part of it is understanding the way Omeka thinks about things,
and if you think in archival terms,
your brain is going to work in an Omeka way more
immediately so it really helps to have
someone with the archival brain helping you with it.
Next slide, please.
I've presented at the Alliance for the Study of
Adoption and Culture in Minneapolis.
That was a Biennial Conference.
A very wonderful conference.
At 2018 at the TOHA conference at
Texas A&M is how I was really introduced to [inaudible],
which has just been an
enormously satisfying relationship for me.
Wonderful group of colleagues who I'm just so glad that I'm working with now.
I asked Megan and Jake if they would be interested in collaborating
on a discussion at the 2019 TOHA conference,
which we had at St. Edward's on this theme of
collaboration among smaller institutions,
because one of the reasons I'm able to work on my project is
collaboration outside of silos of
expertise on one campus and also with other campuses.
I'm just so anti-silo. I hated it.
It's one of the things about academia that I really hate.
I like a lot of things about it (laughter),
and I'm happy that I wish we were not all so silent.
Part of what I would say about this is
breaking out of those silos and breaking out of
your way of thinking about you're in
this box and that's the only box you're going to be in,
is you can just do so much better work and you can maximize
resources at a time when resources are hard.
This is what we've done so far in
terms of sharing the project. Next slide, please.
I just want to give a plug for the upcoming TOHA conference,
which will be at Trinity University on September 24th and 25th.
Feel free to reach out to me,
there's my email, or to baylor.edu/toha.
I can point you in the right direction for
more information about TOHA and about the conference.
I'm going to stop talking now. Next slide, please.
Thank you, Jena. I'm going to talk about the archives,
library side of the collaboration and areas where the bridging the gap happens.
Next slide, please.
First I want to give the involvement overview from my side.
Jena reached out to me in 2017.
I remember there's a coffee shop on St. Edward's and we met and we chatted.
That's where we really started seeing where all of these areas that I
could come in and help with the project and
where the library might be able to help with the project,
because I know one of the things that Jena was
really worried about is what happens if
something was to happen to her and what would be taking care of the project.
That's where we really talked about
digital preservation and places that we could put the contents.
As part of our theme, that's where we discussed what the role and function of
the archives is at a academic university or any institute library,
and also different digital platforms.
I love knowing about different digital platforms,
and I call them my digital toolkit to
figure out what works the best for the project we're trying to accomplish.
One I use the most is Omeka.
I know I saw a question in there,
and I think it got answered a little bit,
but Omeka can be a free like a puppy.
It's a product that you can use.
You can either get omeka.net,
which they'll host for you and you can pay to do smaller projects,
or like for us when we were at St. Edward's or even here at Southwestern,
we have a different version of Omeka which
allows us a little bit more functionality.
There are two versions of Omeka now,
there's Omeka and Omeka S. They function a little differently.
I'm still trying to wrap my brain around Omeka S.
But Omeka is a really great tool for
doing digital collection, digital projects,
and it doesn't really require a lot of IT know-how,
which is what I like and I think worked well for Jena's project,
is that it really helped navigate that.
We're going to help set it up,
but eventually adding more items and things like
that would still fall under Jena and she'd have to help with some of that.
Then also, I was part of the grant application in the sense
of helping figure out a digital preservation plan for the materials,
and just also how would the materials
be housed since really they weren't going to come
into the university archives as they were
not under our collection development policy,
and the project was a faculty project,
so we had to navigate how was that going to work.
Next slide, please.
I want to talk about, where can archivists and librarians,
I'm going to put us all together under one wheelhouse,
talk about how we can help with bridging this gap of projects.
One, is our expertise to projects.
We have a lot of different things that we handle and know about from metadata,
which is one of the things that we helped Jena with,
was coming up with keywords,
and tagging, and just how to sort the information.
Digital scholarship, we do
quite a bit of digital scholarship with different projects,
different products, and then also working on preservation.
We have all these different things that we
do on top of our normal teaching library sessions, helping with research.
There's all these other expertise that we can help with.
We can also connect to other services like the Portal to Texas History.
At St. Edward's, we use the portal for a newspaper project.
Here at Southwestern,
We use the portal to house all of our digital collections or digital items.
We use Omeka to do our digital exhibits.
Then we can also talk and work through infrastructure or software
needs like digital platform storage and equipment.
Especially if you're getting started on a project,
collaborating and talking with your library or others on your campus
can really help you set your project up and figure out what you might need.
For example, here at Southwestern,
we actually have a room set up for audio so
you can do oral history or audio interviews in the room,
in the library, and it's got all of
the audio equipment, the microphones, everything.
NPR interviews have been done in that room, things like that.
There's all these equipment and things that you might be able to take
advantage of and use that are housed in these things.
Next slide, please. I think that I talked through mine pretty quickly.
I'm going to go back and answer a quick question on Omeka and OHMS.
The oral history metadata synthesizer is a plugin that you can use with Omeka.
We did not use it for Jena's projects.
One of the biggest things we did with Omeka is actually try to
figure out how we could make Omeka not look like Omeka.
A lot of the default themes you'll
recognize from institution to institution and that's where Marcos was great,
is he really went in and figured out how to theme our China stories
to look very much just like that is
our China stories and Omeka is the back-end,
just getting all the information in.
The oral history metadata synthesizer is actually something I'm playing with
here for one of our oral history projects that a faculty is working on here.
We're going to work with that on setting up the oral histories.
What it does is it will sync your transcript to your audio.
I will let Jena talk about her lesson.
Yeah, we each had some lesson,
so I'll do this. I will say this.
I do want to say, I said in the chat I want to give Megan another shout
out because she initiated that portal relationship.
I was the faculty advisors of
the student newspaper for 10 years and she was getting
it digitized and working with the folks at UNT to get it up on the portal.
So just really a wonderful project in and of itself.
Lessons, collaborate early with archivist and library professionals.
I cannot encouraged this more,
and I guess what I would add to that is to understand that you
are necessarily going to have different vocabularies.
You're going to speak different languages for a while.
It's going to feel a little disorienting the way it does
when you get to a certain point in your career
and you're used to being the expert in the room,
and you get uncomfortable with not knowing
things and with being honest about not knowing things.
I think that's just a curse of
adulthood and professional life at a certain point.
I really had to become a student of what
my archiving and digital library colleagues do,
I needed to stop and take a breath and understand what is the vocabulary here?
Because there were times in the early conversations where it was like,
we were talking and we were literally just using different terms.
Some of you asked what's Omeka?
Well, of course, that's a question I was asking
and I was also very anxiously involved in this.
We got involved in this NEH grant process and which we were really I was
encouraged to do by the folks at St. Edward's who do
our grants and they were very supportive and wonderful.
You all know it's hard to get grants in the humanities.
It's really tough these days,
but it really required me to let go.
I couldn't write the part of this proposal that made
a case for digital preservation.
I don't have the expertise to do that.
In the beginning, I'll be frank,
I was trying to control everything.
It was when I let go of that and I said, okay,
I've got to turn this over and
acknowledged that I just don't have
the expertise to really write this part of the proposal.
We still need true digital archiving and
preservation at the Munday Library at St. Edward's just as true, I think,
for many academic libraries,
digital archiving and preservation,
as you know, is not putting things on the Cloud.
So that's a whole other area that I've become
really fascinated in and if I ever go back to school,
I'm going back for information and library science
(laughter) so I can do this all the time because I just find it so fascinating.
I found with this project,
think in phases, plan carefully.
If anyone undertaking a major project,
you're going to set yourself up for a lot of stress and
emotional disappointment if you think you can get things done in six months.
This project started in 2015,
I'm still working on it (laughter) as Megan said,
one of the most immediate concerns I had was what if I get hit by a bus?
I think that was probably the first thing I said to you except for,
do you want a latte?
I was so worried.
What would happen to this material that people had shared with me some
very emotional and personal
information that they had shared with me in good faith?
How could it be preserved?
I suddenly became aware of how ephemeral digital materials are,
and we all know how important this is as libraries become more digital,
that we all face up to this and think about it.
When I started to think in chunks of time and to plan carefully and
collaborate more openly and to make myself more of a student,
I think things started to work better.
Finally, see setbacks as opportunities.
I was bitterly disappointed not to get the NEH grant.
I had had a wonderful relationship with the program officer at NEH.
He was very optimistic.
He was trying not to tip his hand,
but then I also understood very few people
get an NEH grant like this right off the bat first hand.
I wasn't coming from Harvard.
There were things I had to be realistic about.
I still had to scrape myself out of bed and have a talk with myself.
What the NEH program office did do was really encourage me to
deepen my relationship with the portal and with
my colleagues in Texas and that helped me.
Really now have an infrastructure of
colleagues around digital library work and oral history.
So keep going.
Don't give up and don't let the big disappointments keep you down.
Just keep slugging at it and keep
collaborating is what I would say. Next slide, please.
- The lessons from my side is, as Jena mentioned,
the discipline-specific language that we sometimes don't
realize that we're using and that we need to be aware of.
Sometimes there is a little bit of education that has to happen in order for us
to really get into the collaboration and really start understanding.
One of the things I want to say is if you feel like there's
frustration point starting to happen is to think
about have you really sat down and thought
about the language that you're using?
That you might be thinking, oh,
they should understand this and they may not because it's
not something that they do day to day.
I think that's one of the things that helped us.
Jena and I sat down at one point and finally said,
"Okay, this is what I mean when I say this."
It really helped get us
through some of the hurdles that we were starting to face
early on in the project because we were trying to come at the same point,
but we're using very different language.
The other thing is really trying to push the boundaries of what you can use.
One of the big things we were trying to figure out is there
something that we could use that
fit the budget which was $0 at the time we were starting.
We were really trying to figure out how we could push and what we chose was
Omeka But there's a lot of different software packages out
there and things that you can do.
I stay up on and I look at
and figure out the different ways we might be able to use.
Then also what really stuck with me and I learned from this is,
is the fact that we weren't doing great outreach.
We weren't telling the campus, hey,
the library can help you with this or this is what the archives can do.
The archives while we are working to preserve
the materials in the collection we also can
lend our expertise for projects and collaboration
and you weren't doing a great job of really promoting that.
So we really changed how we started doing outreach and talking,
and really trying to promote the services that we
could offer for different projects.
Those are some of the lessons that I took away from
this project that have stuck with
me in thinking about working on
few other collaborations that I've done since this project.
- Do we have another next slide?
(laughter) I can't remember.
- I think that's it.
- I think that's it. Maybe we should take questions?
- Wow, Jena and Megan,
(laughter) thank you so much.
I feel like I learned too much for my brain on a Monday.
But I really want to commend you for
just sharing your challenges and vulnerabilities,
your failures along the way,
and being really open about your need for a team and collaborators.
It seems you got a medal for communication and
collaboration that'd be really strong to follow.
I have questions for both of you and I want to invite everyone.
We're in Q&A discussion mode.
We have about 15 minutes left.
You're all invited if you would like
to turn on your cameras and join in the frame.
If you do need to peel off, just a to,
we'll share links out to the recording and slides and everything for today.
I do have a question for you,
Jena, and I know you touched on this,
but I was wondering if you could talk
specifically about how working with Megan and,
or working with an archivist maybe changed
your approach to a project or steps in your process.
- Well, I think it
completely changed it because I had been thinking of this as this website.
I had this airy notion of a digital collection,
but I didn't really understand what that meant.
I think once I started working with Megan I had a much clearer idea of,
oh, wait a minute, technically what this means.
This was also true with oral history that I used as
a place where the two met as they do a lot in the project,
the role of transcripts,
how important transcripts were both from the oral history perspective,
but also from the archiving perspective.
How did I get them?
There's lots of discussions around
transcripts and transcription that we could have,
but where were they going to go?
Megan really helped me with things like
consent and how was I going to keep track of the consents.
Actually the consents are now uploaded on the background of the Omeka site.
They're not public, but I put everything there so
that I have a repository for all the material.
The stuff that is not published,
obviously, I check on publishing.
People can't see it, but I know it's there.
I also understood that there was a full range of things that Megan really
helped me understand thinking about digital archiving and preservation.
That could be frustrating because I realized that's something that we really,
really need and that is resource wise and
everything else can be tough to
convince when there were so many other resources like liberal arts,
universities and campuses that are elusive.
It made me slow down and think in pieces.
Not just, oh, I've got to get the interview.
Now we're thinking in the oral history head.
That's how I was thinking.
I was only thinking in the oral history and this
was going to be this place where I put everything.
But what did that really mean?
It's much more dynamic than that.
I would say it informed everything
about the way I started to think about the project.
Once we were looking at Omeka,
I was really like, oh,
okay because it does make your head think differently about the material.
How you have it, where it goes,
what function it plays in the way that you're presenting the material,
what you're holding back,
what you're making public.
I don't know if that's enough of an answer,
but I would say it changed at all. (laughter)
- I think that's a great answer, Jena.
Just one of the first things you said was, well,
I was thinking it was just going to be
a website (laughter) and then you introduced
the archivist and she's like a bit more than that.
- Yeah.
- A bit more to it. But I appreciate all those things you point out
that maybe those of us who work in the field or work
with archivists or archives miss,
those very big basic ways of thinking.
To Megan, I would ask the same question.
I'm sure you have advised other faculty here or other folks with
their massive or minuscule projects and
just how does Jena's approach change the way you might approach this work?
- Well, I think one of the biggest things was just meeting
a faculty member who didn't really
have an understanding of the archives or the library and I was like,
well, we need to fix this.
I am also like Jena.
I don't like silos.
My ideal we should be sharing information and lending
our expertise as we key to projects so
that we can form these great teams and have these great projects.
But meeting her that really started
percolating just how were we presenting what we can
do to our campus constituents and to the community
and do they know what we can offer?
It's a lesson I learned when I
worked with the Air Force is the Air Force runs on acronyms.
They love their acronyms.
When you first start working for the United States Air Force,
you have no idea what half the time anybody says in
a conversation because the entire sentence is an acronym.
From that I learned that when you meet somebody for the first time you should
really try to use common shared language.
The problem was I got in my archivist's head
again so I had to really back out of that again when working with Jena
and that reminded me that when you're first starting
some of these projects you need to really make sure
that you're laying it out in a language that is
understandable but through all and not a very
discipline-specific because there was terms for digital preservation
that I was piping off to Jena
and she just I think looked at me and was like, what?
This is a foreign language.
I think that's one of the biggest things that I learned is just
really also taking a pause.
I tend to just throw everything,
just dive right in,
which can be overwhelming.
That's where I've learned that take a pause
and really listen to what's being asked and then say,
okay, this is where we can help in very basic terms,
not like, let's dive right in.
We're going to start this project today.
Really just pause and learn that this is
a process of going through a timeline of let's
have our initial conversations and then build on that conversation
and just keep building that project.
- I would say that this entire experience
has convinced me that the most important thing,
what people talk about all the time in academia is
their expertise and I'm tired of it.
I think we should all lead with what don't I know.
What don't I know? It turned out I didn't know a lot.
I know things and the things I really needed I didn't know Megan knew.
Maybe also on the other end,
I think one of the things that even working with Marcos too,
it's this is a story.
This is a collection of stories.
Also how do I, how does Megan,
and how do Marcos bring their expertise to what they don't know,
which is the stories I'm trying to
tell and the form I'm trying to tell them in.
I think if we just start,
what don't I know and who knows the things I don't know.
It's also opened up my appreciation for my colleagues generally on
campus who are doing digital work and we've found each other.
We have this little world we've made that's going to
spread because the world is digital now as we all know.
- Again, just hearing you both talk about
your perspectives on your different angles
and responsibilities with this project,
and I'm thinking of the China's stories project which is
so beautiful and I can't wait to explore more about that.
Maybe this approach with empathy and curiosity
coming from both sides is the secret sauce.
If you will, we have about ten minutes left
and I did want to just invite folks again.
You can unmute and share your questions in chat if you have them,
we can have one question I'd love to get to from Courtney,
and if anyone has any other sort of advice to
others who have worked on these types of projects.
If you have other advice you'd like to share while we're here,
we'd love to hear it, but I do have a good question from Courtney here.
This is for both of you and maybe you could give your perspective.
But imagine if a few is a consortium like Texas Digital Library,
which hosts open source infrastructure and also
community infrastructure, including digital preservation.
How could a consortium which is,
we're made up of 27 member institutions,
hundreds of library and archives workers.
How could something like this support the Oral History Association?
- Oh, I mean,
I think that there are oral historians who are part of
our organization or who come to
our conferences who are
very expert and had been doing far more expert than I am.
There are people like me who are just starting out.
There are people who're not in academic institutions.
I think, in a very ecumenical way helping maybe,
I've been to one of your conferences for instance, and it was great.
It was like this whole world open up.
My head exploded like,
oh my God, they're all here in one room and I'm going to learn all this stuff.
I think if there were a way to find ways to maybe,
as we are collaborating right now,
I think it would be really useful for a lot of
people to have something where they learn a little
bit more about the technical stuff around archiving preservation,
infrastructure platforms that you may go into oral histories,
what you're worried about is, what am I going to record with?
Is it the right recorder?
Have I got ambient noise here?
But then it starts to hit you,
wait a minute, all of this.
Where's it going to go?
How's it going to live?
How is it going to survive?
I think it would be wonderful to do
workshops and stuff around that maybe even as part of
the TOHA conference or the TDL conference or some way where we have some of
the technical and expertise sharing,
I think would be from the oral history perspective,
would be really welcome.
- I think that's great advice.
Again, going back to that,
your focus is on these certain things.
But when you start partnering it
broadens what's possible or it broadens what you knew was
even important or discoverability being something
that I'm sure Megan's work helped you with.
But Megan, what did you think about
that question? Do you have anything to add?
- I think I'll second it,
just helping as we titled this,
Bridging the Gap of the resources and the education.
I know when I was trained in oral histories that
technology now that you can use is so much different.
I was using a recorder with a tape,
which is very different than what you can do now with.
I remember the first time I had to try to consider using Skype,
and I was like, this is never going to work.
It actually allowed to connect with somebody who would never,
we didn't have the budget to fly,
we didn't have the resources to try to get me there.
Using something like Skype allowed us to capture that world history.
But, it's getting that helping the resources because the other thing too,
at smaller institutions,
the resources and the services
might be a little different than at the bigger institutions.
So helping bridge that gap of the trainings,
and the resources and just knowing
that you can put stuff in something like the portal or
there are these other digital preservation options that are available for you.
- Oh, that's great.
I agree. I just wanted to print out we have just a few minutes left.
If there's any other further questions,
I'm seeing some great comments in chat.
Just mentioning again that the TOHA conferences in
person should be like a fun family reunion,
a fun family reunion.
I do hope you all will check that out,
and it's on the campus of Trinity University,
which is such a great campus and do hope everyone can have a chance.
Okay, hi Adrian.
Yes, in-person with virtual components.
Okay, very cool. Very cool.
Courtney is going to go see you.
- I did see one question about how much does Omeka cost?
- Sorry, I missed that.
- No, it's okay. Omeka can vary,
it is actually technically free if you have servers to install it on.
If you don't have servers to install it on,
you can do omeka.net,
and omeka.net they will,
I think the plans start at $35
depending on your sizes and they have limitations.
There are also a number of hosting services that offer to host Omeka for
you and you get a little bit more options that you can do.
That's what we're doing now; we use one of
the other hosting providers to do our Omeka here.
There are different entry levels
and ways that you can do and authorize, that's why I said,
Omeka is free like a puppy because you can install it on your own server,
you have a lot of care and feeding that you have to do with it.
If you let them host it,
you're really just getting to put your project in,
but you're limited on what settings and things you might be able to do.
I would encourage you to check it out.
You can sign up for a free trial.
You can try it out and see what it's like if you've never used Omeka.
There's a lot that you can do to see about that.
But it's fun,
think the University of Kentucky runs they have
a big oral history website that's completely
built out of oral history and the Bracero Project,
which is what I showed Jena,
when we were trying to show what the software could do.
We went and pulled relevant examples of,
hey, this is how other oral history projects have used the system.
What do you like or don't like about this system?
We were are also using Omeka for digital collections.
I could show Jena the backend and say, okay,
this is what you would be using and this is the language that you have
to learn and know what items are or collections mean and all of that.
But that's what it is.
- We have a couple of twins
here who asked questions and I didn't want to address out if that's okay.
Even though it's off the Omeka subject and just to say,
please feel free to follow up with me by email.
I'm happy to talk more about anything.
But someone asked, why were the twins separated?
I would say that the Chinese International adoption system is not open.
There's very, very limited information the Chinese adoptees have
or that their adoptive families learn about their origins.
It may be that the system which is administered by the Chinese government,
maybe the thinking was it would be harder to place twins.
We do have friends who adopted twins.
I know two couples who adopted twins,
but for the most part,
it might have come out of concern that
it would be harder to place them together.
In any event, there are many,
many cases now of separated siblings who are finding one another.
I'll say in my interviews that every time I asked
about birth parents if people were interested in searching for birth parents,
the answer has usually been met with great ambivalence.
But then what the adoptee will say unprompted is,
"I would like to know if I have a sibling."
I think maybe there's something less de-stabilizing about that.
There's not a loyalty test if you love
your adoptive parents and feel
disloyal if you're thinking about your birth parents.
But a sibling doesn't present the same level of concern.
There are a number of issues that arise in the Chinese adoption system that,
and as many of you know,
many questions around her national adoption
that you learn from hearing from the adoptees.
- I'm glad you've addressed Innocent's question that was early added.
I'm so glad you remember to address that.
Again, I learned so much today.
Not just about our kinds and not just about oral history,
but I feel like I've got a new research project here with the trend of stories.
- Thank you both.
- Thank you.
- We're after two,
so we're going to end the recording and just want to say thank you again to
Jena and Reagan for taking time to
share your expertise and knowledge with us today.
It was so fun to get to see
your presentation and thank you from all of us at TDL.
- Thank you for having us.
- I hope you both have a great day and everyone here take care.
We'll see you soon.
- Take care.
- Bye.